I Don't Use BlueSky For The Features
BlueSky lets you take your identity and followers to any other service. But do we care?
In this post:
People gravitate toward settings, situations, and platforms where they know they’ll find their friends and connections
Most people don’t care about the construct and ownership of their online identities
Features don’t drive network engagement
What drives flocks of people from one internet location to another?
Is it their interest in news, celebrity gossip, or meme images? Is it because of a hyped AI product releases? Is it because, suddenly, one platform has a feature that no other platform has? I see you "people talking on a conference call" disguised as an the next big audio platform
Of course, those moments and events help.
But flocks are driven by something simple: group dynamics. People. Friends. Relationships.
Perhaps you have friends. And if you do, you probably try to congregate with them in group moments and situations. Someone suggests bowling and a group of you join with the hope of not falling face-first into the lane. Another suggests group parenting because who can do it alone these days, right?
The logistics of these events come together in group messages. Exactly how and where matters less than the concentration. Close groups of friends don't organize using 5 different apps. Instead, at some point, everyone coalesces around the common formats - email, SMS, and proprietary messaging.
That last category is important as it includes platforms like Apple's iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp. Each offers roughly the same basic functionality: groups, media exchange, security, and phone-number identity.
But, suppose you're in a group using Apple's iMessage - 10 of you in total - and in an instant 9 of your friends decide to use WhatsApp instead. They switch overnight, while you're buried under covers, leaving you in the dark. You wake up with no messages to check, no memes to force water out of your nose as you snort-laugh.
Do you switch? Do you acquiesce and use WhatsApp too? There's no viable alternative except for email and SMS. Yet, your friends executed their choice and you're the odd one out. What happens if you *don't* switch? You're as good as dead.
So, you sign up/in and use WhatsApp because your friends are there too. And the group lingers because it is a convenient place to be. Is it the best messaging experience? Does it have the best security?
Yawn. Who cares. Friends go where friends are.
Om Malik and Fred Vogelstein write Om+Fred, a weekly newsletter that covers their vast experiences embedded in the technology sector. Both are seasoned and respected technology journalists.
Their most recent email newsletter discussed BlueSky, the Twitter-like social network based on the open-source AT Protocol. In the article, they argue that BlueSky fixes what's wrong with social media. In short, social platforms like those under Meta's corporate umbrella centralize control, degrade the user experience, and restrict user network portability.
For example, an influencer with 100k Instagram followers can't take those followers somewhere else. They don't own the connections they make through the platform, instead relying on Meta to maintain them. Walking away from Instagram means walking away from network built through Instagram.
In contrast, BlueSky claims that users can walk away with their identities and connections to any other service using the AT Protocol. But the authors missed the mark when discussing why users signed up for Facebook in the first place:
Twenty years ago when Facebook and LinkedIn were getting started, we all traded openness for convenience. No one had created a social network of any size before. We needed the features, control and operational functionality only possible inside a closed network ecosystem. But most of that technology has been commoditized and open sourced. Most of the innovation in social networking is now going on outside the big social networks.
It’s also comforting, at least to me. Because I’ve seen this movie before. The history of the internet is filled with examples of closed networks being forced open, or dying, as the underlying technology becomes commoditized and open sourced. And that almost always leads to more innovation, more access and a better user experience.
America Online in its earliest days wouldn’t let users send emails to anyone without an AOL email address. Can you imagine email today operating like that? Apple’s iMessage is now under similar pressure, though iMessage has never been entirely closed.
I think the original trade for LinkedIn was not about convenience. It was about momentum. We signed up for Facebook, LinkedIn, and other early social sites because that's where *everyone else* went too. It didn't matter that much what one platform did vs. another. MySpace had far more profile customization than Facebook, but Facebook (and others) eventually killed MySpace. Features didn't drive that shift.
BlueSky's recent rise in popularity looks identical me. I joined BlueSky quite a while ago but let my profile sit dormant. I assumed BlueSky was a lifeless company and service. I never had a reason *to* sign in. Why bother visiting a social network devoid of friends and professional contacts?
Then a friend posted about their switch to BlueSky on LinkedIn. The irony is not lost on me. Another replied in the comments. The post achieved virality within my small sphere of interest. I posted my BlueSky handle, joining the flock. This is the moment, I thought!
These days, I'm an enormous influencer in the BlueSky world. 63 people follow me. I follow 38.
My numbers aren't indicative of the health of the platform, but I think they illustrate one still-vexing problem: people won't use a service, platform, or app built around social networks without, well, *friends*.
In my view, BlueSky's differentiating advantage means nothing to most people. The average consumer doesn't care about whether they own their Instagram followers or not. That ambivalence implies that BlueSky won't scale beyond its technology-oriented users without something else.
What?
People.
I don't notice or spark much engagement recently. There's no extra new shiny-thing excitement, and instead, people are preoccupied with their normal lives. Most friends that temporarily posted quite a bit on BlueSky are back to LinkedIn and Twitter.
Are any platforms powering more engagement without pre-existing real-world connections? Yes, sort of. Substack's community is active but also feels a bit like multi-level-marketing (MLM). The company seems to be more interested in promoting the Twitter-like social network than the newsletter feature.
I don't blame them. Email newsletters don't scale like social networks.
Threads is another engaging platform. There's plenty of junk, sure, but lots of back and forth engagement. No one there owns there followers, but the engagement level suggests that a user with a strong presence can push their followers to other stickier locations: membership lists, email newsletters, etc.