Has Bluesky… kind of failed?

I’ve been singing its praises for the last couple of years but, after an initial spike in late 2024, it is actually declining now. However, I think this decline was brought into stark relief during the current student protests in France. Bluesky was supposed to be the platform of choice for ‘the resistance’, yet Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s new Bitchat has been a key tool for the protesters, and Bluesky has had no significant use at all. Dorsey was instrumental in founding Bluesky, and was originally on the board, but then left because he felt it as ‘repeating all the mistakes of Twitter’.

So where did Bluesky go wrong?

Now, before I get into this I want to establish that (a) I am still 100% Team Bluesky and (b) I think its current problems are temporary. But let’s follow this argument for a bit.

Dorsey’s new app has something that Bluesky doesn’t – something that I think might have been Bluesky’s achilles heel: privacy. Every Bluesky post is public, and that is fundamental to how the platform functions.

Bluesky is built on a particular view of the internet that I think is dying (it might already be dead). It is this idea of the ‘Open Internet’. No barriers. No walls. No rules. A ‘town square’ where users can talk to each other (often anonymously). A Free Speech Absolutist’s utopia, basically.

The early internet was (relatively) free from misinformation, propaganda and harassment only because there weren’t that many people on it and it wasn’t that organised. And if you wanted to see content on the internet you had to look for it: there were no content algorithms to feed you whatever might be most engaging.

So Bluesky got an initial spike of users when Trump was re-elected, at which point the ‘public by design’ feature seemed good for transparency. However, I think this happened to coincide with the point where online bots started to outnumber real users, and AI content has only accelerated this.

Bluesky is better moderated, however, and I find it’s still easier to find and follow accurate journalism than on platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. However, you can still find accurate journalism on those platforms. They are far from free of the accusation of censorship, but Trump has not been able to wield meaningful power on them – certainly nothing to the extent you might expect to find in China or Iran.

Would these platforms have more pressure for censorship from the US government if Bluesky didn’t exist? Possibly, and it may still happen.

But right now, I think Bluesky’s problem is really that it hasn’t proved as useful we thought it would, because it is based on an idea of the Internet that is increasingly out of date.

In fact, for a long time Bluesky’s always-public structure has let to criticism that it has failed to protect users from hostile actors. And perhaps Dorsey was correct in recognising that privacy is what people want: his Bitchat app lets people send messages to each other through bluetooth, thus bypassing the Internet altogether.

However…

It seems like even Bluesky – a company built on the idea of the Open Internet – might be adapting to this new reality.

Bluesky Communities is in the pipeline, as is something similar for the underlying protocol. (And, as I’ve said many times, I think the underlying protocol is arguably more interesting than Bluesky itself.)

I think this is the right move, and I’m excited to see where they take this.

I think this is where the internet is moving, and I think it’s long overdue.

Because the Open Internet idea was always something I was uncomfortable with – this idea that “the laws of the physical world don’t apply”. That only works for as long as it take for plutocrats and other criminals to fully understand it.

Today’s online hellscape was always going to happen, I think.

There’s a reason why houses have walls, and doors, with locks.