Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and landed on Bluesky as being my favorite, perhaps less out of its ostensible inherent virtues and more out of the size of its alternatives' flaws.

Flash forward ninety days, and I feel as though I am a veritable Nostradamus ^[1] — Bluesky has exploded in growth, and much of its theoretical promise has been converted into reality. I struggle to point out a way in which it worse for my use cases than Twitter:

1. Thanks to what is, in retrospect, a genius UX innovation in "Starter Packs", the social graph that Twitter took a decade to meticulously build is now more or less extant in Bluesky. (There are folks missing — there's a lot of growth left to happen — but it's exited the awkward "first three people in a conference hall" phase.)
2. The app experience is performant, stable (relative to Twitter's), and rock-solid.
3. Engagement is higher than Twitter's (both for my personal account and for Buttondown's), and I am not subjected to the maelstrom of awful algorithmically-boosted chum.

More than anything, using Bluesky feels like playing WoW Classic or OSRS — it's in many ways consciously retrograde, and in much the same way that both of the "classic" editions of MMOs have since dwarfed their originators in popularity I would not be surprised if a similar dynamic plays out here: if the concept of a deterministic social graph has any enduring merit now that its sun has set, an app that doggedly clings to its users' nostalgia may end up more successful than one wishing to straddle both the past and the future.

Or perhaps Bluesky's business model — which to my knowledge is still somewhere between nascency and absence — won't work out, and it turns out the only enduring moats for this kind of business are either Panopticon or loss leader. I am not smart enough to guess, but I am grateful to have a social network I actually enjoy using, for as long as I'm lucky enough to have it.