My favorite fact about Blue sky did general manager Jay Graber’s Chinese mother name it Lantian, which means blue sky in Mandarin, but that’s not why Bluesky is called Bluesky. It’s coincidence, or nominative determinism, or both. Anyway, she looks cool.

I don’t really want to talk too much about Graber, a software engineer from Oklahoma who was then named Twitter general manager Jack Dorsey to lead its new Bluesky project in 2021 and would now be its main owner.

But as a woman, she’s bound to attract far fewer cultish followers than some male app owners – Dorsey himself once attracted an intense mix of adoration and derision – so it seems pretty safe to say that It’s refreshing, without that temptation. fate.

So far, at least, its approach to public conversation online, supported by “anti-toxicity” features, seems to be a blessed relief, and given the motivation of the great “Xodus”, it is not without importance.

Bluesky is lighting up and the question now, as always with social media, is how long he can hang on to it and where he goes next.

I’ve been working on it sporadically since September 2023, in the hope that others will see its potential as the app most likely to replicate the helpful interaction and fun knowledge exchange of Twitter’s early days.

Engagement was low to non-existent, but the emptiness was nice. My first message was “I was looking for a creperie but I accidentally found myself in an ancient fortress”, which was neither a crossword nor a metaphor for anything, just an accurate description of my morning, appreciated by three strangers.

As an alternative to the rapidly deteriorating environment offered by Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, I preferred Bluesky to Meta’s Threads, which was all white space and algorithms, and Mastodon’s Mastodon, which was insular by design and heavy with localized label.

Basically, even though Bluesky’s interface looked like Twitter’s and as close as its white and blue logo was to Twitter’s – with a butterfly instead of a bird – Bluesky no longer had anything to do with the box. Musk’s poisonous soap. Dorsey also resigned from his board in May of this year, urging people to stay on X as he goes.

At this point, Bluesky’s numbers were already increasing with each adverse change inflicted on an astonishing influx of dissatisfied X users. and former X users.

Bluesky added a million users in the week following the election result. Today it’s adding a million a day and the small team that manages and owns the app is busy fixing cracks, squashing bugs and dealing with outages as the number of users hits 20 million.

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The contrasts drawn may seem too simplistic. Bluesky is not an “echo chamber,” just as Twitter before Musk never really was one – unless echo chambers often host extremely bitter arguments.

And while X’s “pit” label is fully deserved, it has remained possible, with considerable and increasing effort, to stay off the radar of fascists, robots, and fascist robots. Exposure to vile nonsense and hostility can be limited, at least for some people, by avoiding the “for you” tab, consuming only self-curated feeds, putting a padlock on your account, and never letting your gaze drift towards the answers. It can be done. But why try?

Like Silicon Republic, the Irish tech news site that followed the Guardian’s release last Wednesday, many “left hoping it might one day be saved,” only to conclude that this hope was no longer tenable. The more people leave, the easier it becomes for others to leave.

It doesn’t necessarily come down to a dilemma between running away from toxicity and “staying and fighting,” which is a rather grandiose way of describing having a social media account. Migrating to Bluesky now just makes sense. Start again, keep going.

A little context on its scale: Bluesky is still a minnow compared to Threads, which has more than 275 million users and was adding at the rate of more than a million per day even before the presidential election.

But Threads is boring. It’s annoying from the second you open the app and the default feed is the “for you” algorithmic feed. It’s true that active moderation means it’s not hate-filled like original idiocy in Instagram feeds, giving Threads the power to irritate across platforms.

The result is that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, last seen covering the rap hit Get Low as Z-Pain, is worth nearly $200 billion.

I don’t know if Graber intends to record rap covers or if Bluesky is really as “billionaire-proof” as he claims. I’ll also have to leave it to tech experts to assess whether its belief in a “marketplace of algorithms” and its mission to allow independent developers to create their own social networks using its open protocol will succeed in ushering in a glorious new era transparency. and user control.

But two concrete statements are appealing. The first is that it has no plans to introduce advertising, which indicates that it will instead consider offering some features on a subscription-only basis. The second is that it does not use the platform’s content to train generative artificial intelligence and has “no intention of doing so.”

The slow death of X does not guarantee that a single application will take its place as a quasi-public place. Stockholm syndrome on social media is over. And yet, isn’t it nice to have the option of choosing one that doesn’t rot from head to toe?