It started with Swifties leaving Twitter/X in droves and heading to Bluesky. They were the first to be noticed, but they were the tip of the iceberg.

Bluesky gained its first wave of high-profile users last spring, and switched from being invitation-only to open to the public in February. In the past week 700,000 to a million people have flocked to the platform after the election.

As of this writing, it’s the number one free app on the iPhone’s U.S. App Store.

The past week has seen diverse luminaries from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Dionne Warwick join or reappear on the site. The Guardian announced it was quitting Twitter/X, and it only seems like a matter of time before the news organizations and journalists start posting on Bluesky.

Personally, I’ve locked down my Twitter/X account and threw away the key. Before I did that, I had already used a service called Tweet Deleter to remove all my old posts and likes from the site. It wasn’t free, but I only needed to run it once. I have a single post on Twitter/X and that’s what’s staying. I’ve removed the app from my phone.

As for Bluesky, I have an account, but I’m still mulling over the benefits of attempting to create what I had on Twitter/X. My only post is the same one I have on Twitter/X.

So far, Bluesky delivers exactly what you want, when you want it. While I have not spent hours doing so, Bluesky allows you to curate your own feed, fostering an authentic social media experience.

Am I advocating for Bluesky? Sure, if you want to try and recreate the “old Twitter feeling,” but it’s still social media and social media is really good at making you feel bad. Still, Wired has a great article about getting started with the hot new social network.

However, my thinking echoes Ian Bogost’s piece in The Atlantic. He writes –

A network of any kind—social, communication, epidemiological—is only as effective as the scope of its connections. Two decades ago, when social networks were new, it was easier to develop a rich, broad network because nobody had one yet. MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn helped people build databases of the connections they already had—friends, family, schoolmates, work colleagues. Twitter was among the first social networks that encouraged people to connect with anybody whosoever—to build a following of strangers. That, as much as its distinctive, short-text format, made Twitter what it was. Among other things, it became a distinctive venue to follow live global events, and to share and engage with journalism. It also was a place for brands to interact with their customers, and for businesses to provide customer service.

Bluesky has not yet found its distinctive identity or purpose. But to me, one user among many who started using the service in earnest this week, it feels more like the early days of social networking than anything else in recent memory. The posts I have seen, and made, are dumb and awkward instead of being savvy and too online. For now, Bluesky invokes the feeling of carefree earnestness that once—really and truly—blanketed the internet as a whole. Gen Xers and Oldlennials who had already finished college when Facebook started will remember the strange and delightful experience of rediscovering lost friends on that service—people you hadn’t seen or heard from in years. Now that strange delight itself can be rediscovered: I’ve felt something like it as I watched my Bluesky migration plug-in locate and auto-follow thousands of users whom I hadn’t seen on X or Twitter for years.

But the internet’s media ecosystem is more fragmentary this decade than it was during the last. Uncertainty about social media’s future produces existential questions about the major platforms: Will TikTok be banned? Will X become state media? Will the Bluesky bubble grow beyond this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we can’t help but try to keep them going, for however long we can.