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Bluesky's Decline Stems From Never Hearing From the Other Side (washingtonpost.com) 176

Bluesky's user engagement has fallen roughly 50% since peaking in mid-November, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis, as progressive groups' efforts to migrate users from Elon Musk's X platform show signs of failure. The research found that while many news influencers maintain Bluesky accounts, two-thirds post irregularly compared to more than 80% who still post daily to X. A Washington Post columnist tries to make sense of it: The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump, plus a smattering of those who are merely curious and another smattering who are tired of the AI slop and unregenerate racism that increasingly pollutes their X feeds. Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group, the result is something of an echo chamber where it's hard to get positive engagement unless you're saying things progressives want to hear -- and where the negative engagement on things they don't want to hear can be intense. That's true even for content that isn't obviously political: Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who studies AI, recently announced that he'll be limiting his Bluesky posting because AI discussions on the platform are too "fraught."

All this is pretty off-putting for folks who aren't already rather progressive, and that creates a threefold problem for the ones who dream of getting the old band back together. Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they're mostly talking among themselves.

Bluesky's Decline Stems From Never Hearing From the Other Side

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  • by Steveftoth ( 78419 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @05:11PM (#65440901) Homepage

    if you get rid of the toxic trash accounts that were making Former Twitter a cesspool of bots and flame wars.

    • by schwit1 ( 797399 )

      "toxic trash accounts" == any opinion I disagree with

      • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @06:55PM (#65441161)

        >"toxic trash accounts" == any opinion I disagree with"

        I don't "do" social media, but I do follow Slashdot and several forums. To me, toxic accounts are those people who:

        1) Make political comments in a forum where the topic it is not about politics. To them, everything is an excuse to post their views about politics or blame something on whatever administration. Slashdot has users that do this a LOT, unfortunately. And it is quite irritating.

        2) Make personal attack posts. Instead of being silent, or disputing something rationally, they stoop to name calling or throwing insults. This is something reasonable people would NEVER do in person, and doing it online isn't acceptable either.

        3) Selfish/lazy people who don't search or read any previous threads/posts and just show up demanding attention or answers. Usually things that have already been discussed or answered many times before. Or over-quote a ton of crap for a "me too" or "yes" or short reply because they are too lazy to trim.

        Most relevant to your comment, I do not consider people with different opinions/views/beliefs as mine as toxic or trash. And I can fully, civilly, and often productively engage with such people, as long as they are also civil. I don't assume they are evil, stupid, or ignorant. Some might be, but one has to give everyone the "benefit of the doubt."

        There is something "broken" in many people when they are "online". I really don't understand it.

        • To me, toxic accounts are those people who:

          1) Make political comments in a forum where the topic it is not about politics. To them, everything is an excuse to post their views about politics or blame something on whatever administration. Slashdot has users that do this a LOT, unfortunately. And it is quite irritating.

          coughcough rsilvergun coughcough

    • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @06:31PM (#65441119) Homepage

      if you get rid of the toxic trash accounts that were making Former Twitter a cesspool of bots and flame wars.

      My theory has always been that all microblogging services inherently devolve into cesspits. The post character limit and abysmal handling of threaded replies makes it so that every discussion inevitably turns into people yelling insults at each other. Seriously. You're not fitting that five paragraph essay about why vaccines are actually a good thing into a tweet, so you may as well tell the anti-vaxxer that their mom is a hoe instead.

      My continuance of this line of thought is that perhaps some people are just over it. They left X and don't need a replacement for the pointless online drama.

      • by Too Late for Cool ID ( 1794870 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @06:41PM (#65441141)

        My theory has always been that all microblogging services inherently devolve into cesspits.

        That's strongly argued in "Social Media Upheaval" by Glenn Reynolds. It's only 68 pages long, deliberately written so it could be read on a typical airline flight. Highly recommend.

        • by mjwx ( 966435 )

          My theory has always been that all microblogging services inherently devolve into cesspits.

          That's strongly argued in "Social Media Upheaval" by Glenn Reynolds. It's only 68 pages long, deliberately written so it could be read on a typical airline flight. Highly recommend.

          My typical flight averages at 6.7 hours... however I'm convinced your average twitter user will be unable to read 68 pages on one subject in that time.

    • by munehiro ( 63206 )

      See, the problem is that the "toxic trash" is just other people having a different opinion and experiences. When you create a situation where the "toxic trash" is isolated for being "toxic trash", what do you think it's going to happen? that they realize they are wrong and join you?

      Nope. that's not how humans work. All you have done is to ensure that the "toxic trash" now forms its own group with no contradicting voice, and goes underground, which actually reinforces the problem rather than mitigate it.

      Besi

  • Their user base has been growing constantly. McArdle is a fucking hack.
  • * laughs in dialog *

  • Listen to Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Trump's Wharton School.

    If you're a right-winger, it's a terrible place to be. Don't come!

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's actually pretty good for ring-wingers. Sure, there's a lot of progressive content (lame for right-wingers) but Bluesky also has some of the best coverage for Trump's various court cases which have stemmed from his illegal and anti-American orders. Indeed, I've found Bluesky to be rather anti-Trump, and that's a position that Democrats, conservatives, and the majority of liberals all agree on (with the obvious exception, MAGA).

  • In other late-breaking news today, it was revealed that the Pope considers himself to be Catholic...
  • by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @05:19PM (#65440947) Homepage

    Echo chambers are comfortable, but conflict drives engagement.

    "Someone on the internet is WRONG, I must do something about it!"

  • FB is bad enough for those who dislike the current US government to be constantly seeing things shared.

    BlueSky is that times a thousand. While there are other topics discussed, the political posts overwhelm the feeds, and 'bleed' into the other topics you might have tried to make special feeds for. Disney, National Parks, Muppets, Science, Star Trek - everything has a political angle that somebody is going to bring up.

    So I quit (or rather, stopped visiting). I can't live with outrage-generation 24-7, but BlueSky has turned into that (and Threads is pretty full, too).

    • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      Yep I login to some of these sites and I see 3-4 tangentally-related things that are clearly algorithm rage-bait, designed to drive user interaction. I'm so tired of this. I login for 10-15 minutes a handful of times a week to check in on friends and family for updates, and then promptly uninstall the app.

    • Just block keywords you don't want to hear about. It really cuts out the US Government-related news. Or make use of someone else's "mute list". https://lifehacker.com/tech/ho... [lifehacker.com] https://boringstorybook.com/bl... [boringstorybook.com]
    • by flibbidyfloo ( 451053 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @06:02PM (#65441047)

      Sorry to be blunt, but this is just laziness. I hit the political fatigue wall a few months ago, so I made a new feed that only includes accounts that are focused on specific non-political topics - dogs, games, etc. Took me all of 5 minutes and that's my default feed now. The "following" feed is still there when I want to dip my toes into the wider garbage-sphere, and liberal use of easy to find block lists keeps the trolls away. The difference is that I don't spend all day scrolling because I actually run out of stuff to look at on Blue Sky and shut the browser tab when I'm done. It's delightful!

      I don't know if their business model is sustainable, but it would be a real shame to lose it, because personally this bubble is exactly what I'm looking for from social media right now. I have zero regerts over not hearing the toxic bullshit and slop that's taken over the other platforms because I'm not a drama-addicted shell of a human that needs to "engage" with random strangers that have nothing but stupidity to contribute.

      I can have meaningful conversations about topics with people of different viewpoints by engaging with my extended friend group and a curated list of news sites and subreddits.

    • by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

      The other thing I find a problem is the bar for outrage keeps getting lower as well. Now you can simply say 'Your rights end where mine begins' which for equality and everyone treated fairly makes complete sense, but then they get mad at that, the truth turns out a lot of people think they should have more rights than others for and love to manipulate the heck out of it to make their justifications.

    • Sadly true. I also left.

      Social media platforms only serve those who like to suck the oxygen out of the room.

      There is absolutely no critical thinking going on there.

  • by quax ( 19371 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @05:22PM (#65440959)

    Twitter used to be good for news, and the same is now true for BSky. Plenty of lists that supply me with news on Ukraine, science, technology and other topics that I am interested in.

    My engagement there has not declined nor do I perceive a slowdown in posts.

    • Content creators I follow post regular updates. I keep up with projects, life updates, events. I'm actually pretty happy not having everything turn into politics. I see too much of that content elsewhere already. And I don't have algorithmic feeds, so I open the app up once a day, catch up and close. No infinite scroll engineered to get me angry.
      • The main issue I've had on BlueSky is that the people who I followed on Twitter and who also have BlueSky accounts do not update their BlueSky feeds as regularly. But it does seem like that situation is slowly improving.

  • A few from "the other side" came over just to troll, then quit when they were blocked rather than getting rewarded with engagement.

    Thankfully Bluesky isn't a private social media company that just wants to juice its engagement, which only leads to a gradual enshitification of the product (and society's discourse in the process).

    • Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Yeechang Lee ( 3429 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @06:32PM (#65441123)

      A few from "the other side" came over just to troll, then quit when they were blocked rather than getting rewarded with engagement.

      ... That's exactly what the Post article means by "echo chamber".

    • Thankfully Bluesky isn't a private social media company that just wants to juice its engagement, which only leads to a gradual enshitification of the product (and society's discourse in the process).

      ...yet.

      1) Why do social media companies want to juice their engagement?
      2) What are the inherent human traits and economic forces driving enshittification?
      3) Which software/media businesses reach the scale of having >10 million unique users per day, and continue not-being-evil for the next 10 years?
      4) Considering the examples you come up with for #3, what do you believe makes those businesses immune to the natural-selection pressures of #1 and #2?
      5) What are the profitability trends for the examples in #3

  • The app sucks, no third party apps, and no browsers can access it on android or iphone, I quit commenting because too many snowflakes melt when they encounter an opposing opinion so I just use BlueSky like a news aggregator & news reader
  • It's slightly obfuscated but it has the same catastrophic social engineering flaw that all other free social media platforms have. If users aren't the ones paying the bills, then they aren't the customer.

    Companies shape platforms according to their customers' needs but we're not the customer so the platform isn't being shaped in our image. It's still just a marketing and data mining platform.

    Any platform that isn't user-supported will fail. They have to. There's no other way for that story to end.
    • You've just made an excellent argument for publicly funded news media like BBC, CBC and such. They might not be perfect, but at least they aren't complete whores.

      • There absolutely should be a public option for social media. All of the tech that makes social media work is open-source. The only proprietary code that Google, Facebook and Twitter have are the parts that show ads and hide valid information.

        At this point it's safe to say that the product of Web 2.0 wasn't user generated content so much as platform generated users. Best case scenario 95% of twitter are children in a space for adults. The more likely scenario is that 95% of twitter are monetized swarms of a
  • and I don't think it means what you think it means. Progressive? We're seeing the progress around the world, if that's what you're calling it. Also somehow since it's not better it's always someone elses fault, Maybe progress towards slavery where the elites dominate the working class because they think it's their turn or something?

  • If it is possible on a site to vote comments up or down and the result of that vote means something ( I think it is largely irrelevant here ), then it must be possible to vet that voting to ensure that it is based on valid criteria and not simply based on disagreeing with the points expressed.

    If there was a site like that, where my arguments counted and the woke or Maga mobs could not vote them away, I would try it.
    • You want a site to read people's minds?
      Not even a juror has to explain their vote.

      • I don't want to read minds, I want moderators' decisions to be public so we can hold them accountable for actions that do not help raise the level of discourse.

        A juror is not a valid comparison. Their decisions must be kept secret for good reasons and they only make them very occasionally.
  • I use Bluesky, and I have been kicked off of Twitter for saying not so nice but also true things about Elon Musk (no fact checking to speak of, just got the boot) so I can't compare them now. But some things don't work right. Their algorithm shows me a lot of kinds of stuff I never interact with, though it always is showing me new accounts. I guess by "we don't have an algorithm" they meant it was very primitive. When I try to post images they come up as all black in the correct dimensions. It worked for a

  • Right. So a completely impartial, disinterested source /sarcasm, not even an actual journalist, but a columnist, writing a predictably clunking opinion piece, for a newspaper whose reputation has not exactly been enhanced since the events leading up to last November, and then beyond.

    I had a Twitter account for 17 years, joining in May 2007. I say had, because last autumn, after not posting, and using it read only for over a year, I finally deleted it. Why? Because it was a bin fire, a horrible swirling shit

  • Most obviously, it makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they're mostly talking among themselves.

    Twitter was a battleground for both sides, and people enjoyed the back-and-forth. When Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, half the users up and left X for the BlueSky sanctuary - no one on the right even contemplated making the move.

    There is literally nothing bluesky can do to attract conservatives, and with an ecosystem that is almost exclusively of one mind, they are little more than echo chamber.

    • We seem to be at the point of a Civil War at this point. MAGAs are in their "Echo Chamber", and some reasonable people try to reason with them. The reasonable people get personally attacked, and called unreasonable names, and they react instead of act. It is time for reasonable to simply act.
  • Because rage bait drives engagement. If you have a online platform that discourages rage bait it's going to get less engagement by design.

    Unfortunately since engagement is the currency of the Internet it's hard to avoid flooding a website with it. I have been trying lately to remove the useless political channels that don't have any useful information from my feed and they keep cropping up. Garbage like The Young Turks or Vaush. And absolutely nothing I do gets the right wing stuff out of my feed becaus
  • So, basically, Bluesky is Slashdot v2.0
  • by shm ( 235766 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @09:02PM (#65441411)

    The moment you offer a different viewpoint on a thread on Bluesky, you will get selectively blocked. I am not sure how many levels of blocking they have, but it makes for a very disjointed experience.

    Echo chambers rarely live long, after some time every one will have heard and said whatever they want to hear and say.

    • by munehiro ( 63206 )

      Right wing looks for enemies outside.

      Left wing looks for enemies inside. They purge whoever does not align with their new "point of view of the day" until only those who always comply to every twist and turn remain.

      The left is a Bose-Einstein condensate.

  • by stikves ( 127823 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2025 @02:21AM (#65441747) Homepage

    I think it was Facebook back then that made a study on this. But I might be mistaken.

    "Rage" content brings more engagement. And the natural way to do this is bringing both sides together. (There are also "unnatural" ones like russian troll farms, but let's ignore that for a moment). That is why platforms where people on the boundary interact with each other tend to grow more. And echo chamber deteriorate over time.

    Blu Sky?
    They are an extreme echo chamber. Even if you have 99% agreement with their views, a simple question can get you a ban. A "serious offense" will get you a permanent one. Basically they are run by worse types of Reddit mods.

    Good luck to them. They had their 15 minutes of fame, but unless they become more welcoming to other points of views, they are destined for a slow demise.

  • ...while keeping the Twitter account will never work.

    If you do not like Twitter close your damn account and never look back, it's the only way.

  • > The people who have migrated to Bluesky tend to be those who feel the most visceral disgust for Musk and Trump

    Do I have to have a personal relationship with Ronald McDonald in order to enjoy a burger :o
  • Sadly what this really shows is that building something that caters to people just wanting to socialize isn't considered a success because the metrics pundits and advertisers really care about is 'engagement', which mostly means angry or miserable people arguing. Metrics are why we can not have nice things, since they don't define _our_ nice things as worthwhile to buisnesses.
    • I mean, sure, that's correct, but only if you limit yourself to for-profit corporations as stewards for 3rd spaces. I prefer to exclude those almost entirely.
  • It really says something about the times we live in that a social network's success becomes defined by polarized political discussion. Political discussion is vital of course, and is one of the existential crises of our lives, but there are other things to talk about: music, art, history, tech, science... the whole human sphere. People need a third space to thrive as the social beings we are, and when all of our connections are reduced to us vs. them, I fear for our humanity.

  • Seriously, ActivityPub delivers what BlueSky promised but their monetization strategy won't allow them to deliver. And I think folks are realizing that BlueSky exists so a corporation could have an ActivityPub-like ecosystem where they get centralized control and corporate-style (read: nazi-friendly) moderation while the users get the hosting costs. Nobody wants what BlueSky's offering when the fediverse is right there.
  • Typical convesation on Bluski:

    "Blah blah blah blah"
    "Agree"
    "Yup"
    "Amen"
    "F Trump."
    "Yes!"

A slow pup is a lazy dog. -- Willard Espy, "An Almanac of Words at Play"

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