The state of play

Much of the discussion about Twitter’s slow death — or, if not death, metamorphosis into a place where I prefer not to spend my time and energy — and its theoretical successors (Bluesky, Threads, et al) quickly turns to the realm of moral imperative, at which point it becomes to me odious and unproductive.

I frankly do not want to replace Twitter, nor do I want it to die. I owe my career and my business to the connections I’ve made there. I am a loyal fan, in much the same way the Joe Philbin era did not cause me to swear off the Dolphins forever (though perhaps it should have.)

For me, my motivation to replace Twitter is twofold and bluntly realpolitik:

1. Many of my friends (digital and otherwise) are no longer on Twitter, and therefore it is a less compelling social network.
2. Twitter no longer generates significant traffic either to my blog or to my business, and therefore it is a less compelling social network.

The past six months or so have been, to a certain extent, a listening tour of all the various heirs apparent to see what struck me as “better”.

• LinkedIn appears to be the network that has most obviously benefited over the past twelve months in terms of volume and activity. The experience of using LinkedIn feels roughly like a 101-level course on “business skills” at a liberal arts school — the algorithmic timeline is polluted with anodyne content (each one of them punctuated with a completely unrelated video to juice consumption metrics), my inbox is uncontrollable and filled with sponsored invitations to online MBA programs, and the amount of legitimate content that I am interested in consuming is probably around 5%. Despite these things, the network part of LinkedIn is great, and I have been able to forge legitimate connections.
• Threads feels very vividly like using a product that is undergoing some sort of internal civil war. There are parts to like and admire: I think it has the best interface of any social networking product I’ve used; I admire Meta’s forays into the developer ecosystem and the fediverse even if they’re probably coming from a cynical place. Unfortunately (and this might be true of Meta products writ large, but I don’t use Facebook or Instagram) Threads is so deepl[^]y committed to divorcing you from your follower graph that it’s hard to actually spend more than five minutes in the interface without finding a piece of content so anodyne/stupid that you close the tab, a strategy seemingly encouraged by their refusal to let you default to Following and decision to take a page out of LinkedIn’s book and push recommended content into the notifications tab.
• Mastodon in many ways is the anti-Threads. Using Mastodon is a deeply calm experience; I see exactly the people and content that I have opted in to see, folks are generally very pleasant and polite, and I never feel like I am fighting against ActivityPub or the broader lattice of decentralization. However, the Mastodon experience is (in many cases intentionally!) poor, especially as a business: the inability to search instances for someone mentioning buttondown.com, the lag and jank of notifications, and so on, are not deal-breakers but do leave something to be desired.
• Slack/Discord/WhatsApp are, as many people know, where the true juice is these days. The highest-bandwidth conversations I’m having are in hyper-specific, highly-engaged servers like Email Geeks and Stockholm Syndrome Pythonistas, filled with lots of really great discussions around a single topic. This is (and I say this knowing full well I run the danger of veering towards the realm of moral imperative!) not a social network by any non-trivial standard, because these discussions are not publicly visible and most importantly they are not indexed. This is useful in some respects — privacy augers candor — and sad in others, and I call it out less as a legitimate replacement for The Public Squre and more as a sad acknowledgement that the kinds of terrific, nuanced conversations that we were having in public ten years ago we are now having behind closed doors.
• I am simply too old for TikTok.

Bluesky

This leaves the titular social network of this post, and the one that I find myself enjoying the most: Bluesky.

Setting aside whatever preconceived notions you might have as to Bluesky’s Twitter-inflected past, ATProto’s legitimacy as a protocol, or the word “skeet”, Bluesky checks all of my very specific, curmudgeonly boxes:

1. It has an open and legible API (albeit one that is in flux);
2. My friend and colleagues use Bluesky non-trivially;
3. The interface is not unpleasant to use (which I do not mean in a damning-with-faint-praise way — my bar is simply “I do not want to actively feel bad whilst using the app”, and Bluesky meets that)

I think if you are in any kind of Hacker News-adjacent zeitgeist (which, if you’re reading this, you probably are!) you might want to sign up for an account. It’s a pretty good experience, and feels more than anything else like what being in a nascent-but-vibrant social network felt like a decade ago. It is not (to steal a phrase from Jacob Matson) load-bearing; most people are not yet on there, and whether that is a benefit or a drawback is left up to you to decide.

Bluesky Social PBC

One thing I find myself asking, in a spirit of good faith and charity: what is Bluesky’s endgame?

It is hard to make the finances for a social network really work (pour one out for Cohost). Threads obviates this problem by being part of the Metaverse; Mastodon’s decentralized architecture eliminates their need to really “have” an endgame.

Bluesky raised an $8M series A and appear by all accounts to be managing burn pretty reasonably, but the most optimistic/realistic path I see is a sort of “Twitter on New Game Plus” scenario — the same monetization route, with all of the niceties that they’ve accrued along the way (ATProto, open sourced clients, etc.)

It may be a failure of either imagination or conviction that I can’t see some other path; indeed, Bluesky’s success or failure probably hinges on their ability to find a path forward without having to construct the two-sided-advertising Borg (or to do so at a hitherto-unseen level of amicability).

Regardless of their future, I am quite happy they are giving it a shot, and I’m looking forward to spending more time over there (even if it’s in a decidedly POSSE manner.)