Why Bluesky's Community Vibe Might Just Be What You Need

Until a couple of weeks ago, you may not have heard of Bluesky, but now it’s all over the news. This social media platform, created by the original Twitter team, seems to be all the buzz. But why?

According to a user counter posted by CEO Jay Graber, Bluesky currently has more than 21M users. That’s a massive jump from the 6M users the company claimed to have in August and a stellar climb for a social media app that opened to the public in February 2024. But it still doesn’t answer the question of why.

The consensus is that all the new users have been leaving X (formerly Twitter) since the 2024 presidential election. Setting politics aside, consider a study conducted by Computer scientist Keith Burghardt at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI). According to his findings, hateful user tweets have nearly doubled since Elon Musk took over Twitter. And people are just plain tired of hate.

In my research, I’ve come across dozens of people posting about why they’ve moved to Bluesky. Like Eve Peyser, who wrote in The Intelligencer in 2023, she was no longer posting on X because of the negativity there. She moved to Bluesky while it was still in the invite-only stage, and she’s still there, though she hasn’t posted in a while.

Another reason that people might be moving to Bluesky is the sense of community you can get there, which is not necessarily available in other social media applications. Bluesky is a ‘federated’ social media, which means it’s like a network of interconnected networks. You choose which networks you want to be a part of and just stay out of the others.

That could be why Bluesky user Amy Ash posted, “bluesky got me hooked by showing me posts by people I like and follow on purpose.” and user Shane Phillips responded with, “I’ve had more fun interactions here in 3 days than I’d had for months on Facebook. It’s nice to see stuff I actually like.”

It seems like one of the main drivers is that Bluesky has a growing community that seems genuinely interested in creating a friendly and supportive environment. Will it stay that way? It’s hard to know. Eventually (and it’s already happening), the advertisers will move in. And I’ve already seen a little more nastiness than I did in the months before the Great X-odus. Only time will tell. Until then, Bluesky is a much more relaxed social media platform than its competitors.