I care a lot about the future of social media. It’s how many of us learn about the world and connect to each other; putting something so important in the hands of a handful of centralized corporations has repeatedly proven itself to be harmful. That’s why I’m so excited about the growth of federated and decentralized social media in the wake of Elon Musk’s disastrous acquisition of X. These platforms give more control to communities and individuals, reducing the risks of a central corporation manipulating the global conversation through algorithms or other means.

Although a lot of my focus has been on Fediverse platforms like Mastodon, from time to time I’ve mentioned that I’m really impressed with what the Bluesky team has achieved. The Bluesky platform is growing very quickly and seems to be the go-to choice for less-technical users like journalists, politicians, and so on who want to leave X. Bluesky offers valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of social media and how to build a vibrant alternative platform.

• Easy to understand onboarding: You register at the Bluesky site. To get you started, you can access “starter packs” of users to follow around various topics, so your feed is never empty. Here’s a starter pack of ProPublica journalists, for example, or people in tech from underrepresented communities.
• It feels alive: The posts are both timely and engaging. This is in contrast to Mastodon, where they’re purely chronologically-ordered, or Threads, where I was still seeing hopeful posts from before the election a week later (because they piggybacked on the Instagram algorithm, which is optimized for a different kind of content). News can actually break here — and so can memes. Find an old-timer and ask them about ALF: an inside joke that I absolutely refuse to log an explanation for here.
• Search works universally: It simply doesn’t on Mastodon, and I can only describe the search engine on Threads as weird.
• It’s moderated and facilitated: The site has easy-to-understand moderation. More than that, the team seems to have invested in the culture of the community they’re creating. Particularly in the beginning, they did a lot of community facilitation work that set the tone of the place. The result — so far — is a palpable sense of fun in contrast to a seriousness that pervades both Threads and Mastodon.

At the same time, Bluesky benefits from an open mindset, an open-source codebase, and a permissionless protocol that allows anyone to build tools on top of it. Critics will note that it isn’t really decentralized yet: there’s one dominant personal data store that basically everyone is attached to. In contrast to Mastodon’s model of co-operative communities anchored by a non-profit, Bluesky is a venture funded startup that grew out of Twitter.

Other critics complain about the involvement of Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter and therefore a lot of the problems that we’re all trying to get away from. I don’t think that’s a valid complaint: he famously both established Bluesky because he felt that Twitter should have been a protocol rather than a company, and both left the board and closed his account after becoming dissatisfied with the way Bluesky was run as a moderated community. He has since described X as “freedom technology” and put a ton of his own money behind Nostr. I’ve personally found Nostr to be a particularly toxic decentralized network dominated by Bitcoin-loving libertarians. This may indicate where his priorities lie.

I’ll be honest: on paper, I like Mastodon’s model better. It’s a community-driven effort paid for transparently by donations, much like any non-profit. (Much like any non-profit, the bulk of the funding comes from larger entities, but these are advertised on the Mastodon website alongside smaller-dollar donors.) I also like the co-operative model where smaller communities can dictate their own norms but interoperate with the larger network, which means that, for example, communities for trans posters or journalists can provide more directed support.

But this model faces a much harder road. It means, firstly, that there is less money to go around (Bluesky has raised $36M so far; Mastodon raised €326K in 2022), and secondly, that it’s harder to understand for a new user who wants to join in. It’s also clear that CEO Jay Graber has established a cohesive team that by all accounts is a lot of fun to work in. That counts for a lot and has helped to establish a healthy community.

Even with its hurdles, Mastodon’s model embodies a rare, user-first ethos, and I believe it’s worth supporting. In the end, the future of social media may depend on which values we choose to uphold.

I suspect both will continue to exist side by side. If I had to guess, Bluesky might become a mainstream platform for people who want something very close to pre-acquisition Twitter (which it is rapidly becoming right now), and the Fediverse might become the default glue between any social platform. For example, I post my book reading activity on Bookwyrm, which I find more useful in its own right than Goodreads. Other people can follow and interact with my book reviews there, or they can follow from other Fediverse-compatible platforms like Mastodon. (Right now, my followers are about half and half). Mastodon itself will allow niche supportive communities to grow, and of course, the fact that Threads is building Fediverse support means that any of its hundreds of millions of users will be able to interact with anyone on any other Fediverse platform.

Bluesky may evolve into a streamlined alternative to Twitter, while the Fediverse could serve as a decentralized, cross-platform connector among diverse networks. This dynamic offers a promising future for users, with both worlds learning from one another in a productive tension that has the potential to strengthen the open social web. That’s good news for everyone who values an open, user-driven future for social media.