Bluesky's nearly there, but it won't replace X just yet

Bluesky was an indirect product of Elon Musk’s controversial 2022 Twitter takeover, pitched as a decentralised, user-first alternative to the site that became X. Originally a side project funded by Twitter itself, its new goal is to stand on its own two feet as a more open, interoperable social network.

There are a few reasons some users are dissatisfied with X - algorithm tweaks and moderation choices to name just a couple. Bluesky offers a kind of reset for those seeking something more akin to the Twitter of old, albeit with some modern tweaks and that underlying decentralised philosophy.

But ideals aside, I was curious as to what the day-to-day Bluesky experience actually feels like. So over the course of a month, I gave it a good go.

Getting started

Setup was what you’d expect from any social network: an email/password signup (Bluesky currently offers multi-factor authentication only via email) followed by an opportunity to fill out some basic profile information and select your interests so the algorithm has at least something to go on.

By default, I was assigned a .bsky.social username. But by confirming my domain ownership via a TXT DNS record, I was able to update it to @mattcasmith.net. This exists in the spirit of the open, platform-agnostic philosophy behind Bluesky, of course, but for me it was just a nice extra layer of personalisation to use my web address as my handle.

Next came the daunting task of attempting to port my follows from X and fill my feed with interesting stuff. This process triggered some reflection on the current state of my X account. Most posts I see there come from a minority of accounts I follow, and in reviewing the list I found many silent or low-quality profiles that weren’t worth looking up on Bluesky. Maybe a clearout is due.

During this process, I found the Bluesky search function to be less friendly than X’s - it seemed to rely much more on exact matches to my queries. But I also faced four more significant obstacles in recreating my X experience:

1. Many people I follow on X were absent altogether
2. Of those who were present, many had just parked their usernames without ever posting anything to Bluesky
3. Many were active on Bluesky months ago, but looked like they’d abandoned their profiles and gone back to X
4. For those posting on both social networks, many appeared to be on X more frequently and didn’t mirror everything to Bluesky

These problems don’t seem to be unique to me, because during my time with Bluesky I stumbled across several bot accounts that simply reposted anything a high profile account posted to X - for example, @paulgbot.

Ultimately, a social network thrives or dies based on its adoption levels within an individual user’s network, but I persevered in the name of science. Who knew, maybe I would discover hundreds of new and interesting people who I never followed on X, or who were never there in the first place.

Feed and content

My first impression was that the Bluesky feed looked much the same as X - perhaps even a little bit cleaner in terms of layout - but felt more responsive. It was noticeably quicker to load and refresh - although from an engineering standpoint I’m aware it’s operating at a fraction of the scale.

However, there were a couple of small comparative annoyances:

• There’s no setting to collapse images and link previews, so it takes a lot more scrolling for me to see the same number of posts
• I see a fair few Japanese posts in my feeds, so it’s frustrating that that Translate link is outbound to Google Translate, adding tab clutter and requiring you to dismiss a cookie pop-up if you run a clean browser

From a content perspective, my first issue was that by joining Bluesky I lost all of my muted terms from X, so my Discover feed was polluted with a lot of negativity and I needed to start over to filter it out. However, with careful application of likes and mutes, its quality slowly increased.

I could at least appreciate that most of the posts in my Bluesky feed originated from real people. The modern X algorithm seems to favour faceless content farm accounts in the For You feed, while Bluesky’s Discover feed primarily featured individuals and felt more genuine as a result.

But Bluesky also retains the catastrophising, snarkiness, and sub-tweeting (sub-posting?) that was largely pushed out of X in recent years. It often feels like a huge competition to see who can invent the biggest grievance with the most mundane aspect of everyday life. This is perhaps best illustrated by a post I spotted from the always-brilliant Captain Disillusion:

At Bluesky restaurant with friend
ME: Happy birthday, dude.
Stranger in next booth whips around
STRANGER: Birthday?? People are dyinggg!!!

I sympathise with many of the causes, but it’s exhausting as a social media experience - especially when many of the complaints interpret the original post on the least charitable terms possible. My heavily curated X feed, on the other hand, leans towards people with curiosity, optimism, and ambition.

Interaction and discoverability

I observed all of the above negativity in others’ discussions and stayed well out of it, but what about people’s interactions with me? Well, generally when I did jump into discussions they were pleasant. I even had one guy react positively to a counterpoint, which is basically unheard of online.

But I’ll say straight up that joining Bluesky is not a cure if you’re suffering from low engagement on X. I did get a couple of likes on my first post (I’m not sure how those users found it, outside of new account promotion or the popularity of the term “AI”), but what followed was a familiar quiet.

I did receive more random likes on Bluesky than I do on X, but overall I think that X feels less like yelling into a void because of its transparency on post impression metrics. On Bluesky, you have no idea whether anybody saw your post at all unless they decide to interact with it, which is much rarer.

My account amassed followers more quickly than on X (just over 20 in a month, which many will consider rookie numbers), but a fair few of those were bots with OnlyFans links in their bios. What was weird is that they would often disappear from my Notifications page, so Bluesky seemed to be aware that they were spam or low-quality accounts, but my follower count never decreased accordingly, so it seems like they continued to exist.

An unproven quantity

What Bluesky has going for it is that some people are ideologically driven enough to keep it alive. I don’t think that getting bored will be a strong enough reason for many of its users to hop back to X, and that means that even if it’s a slow burn, ongoing use and development seems certain.

And outside of the small inconveniences I mentioned, the platform mostly does a good job - it’s the network that’s currently lacking. It’s not just the tone of some of the discourse, it’s that there are simply fewer of the people I want to follow - the technologists, builders, developers, and entrepreneurs - than there are on the site formerly known as Twitter.

Therefore, I would say that Bluesky is inferior to X in its current state. But that’s not to say that it’s not worth the effort. The two sites offer different experiences, and it would only take a little more momentum and a few more migrants in my niche to make it my primary social network.

Until such a day, Bluesky sits in limbo. It’s enjoyable enough to continue using, but too incomplete to fulfil its goal of replacing X entirely.