The Search for Old Twitter: Is Bluesky the Next Internet Town Square?
My cautiously optimistic take on Bluesky. The platform has some good potential but also some limitations holding it back from becoming old Twitter.
TLDR Summary
Twitter is truly dead. It really is X now.
There is little reason to put time investment into the site.
Bluesky has a lot of momentum compared to other challengers.
Journalists and academics have joined the platform in droves.
Find me there at PoliticsAndEd.
I wouldn’t put all my eggs into the Bluesky basket.
Over-moderation may limit the site’s broader social network effect.
But it can still be a fairly enjoyable niche platform.
Neither X nor Bluesky are the New Internet Town Square of old Twitter.
Missing the Internet Town Square
Old Twitter is dead. Long live old Twitter!
Twitter is now fully X—merely a zombie version of its former self. I vowed to never call the site X, but I must fully admit that it’s just a different plane than old Twitter. It is no longer the Internet Town Square.
Too many interesting people have left the site, such as academics or journalists, the very people I enjoy connecting with on these platforms. A lot of them left because of Elon Musk’s politics.
As I covered before, the political stuff didn’t bother me as much as Musk’s other changes to the algorithm that have made the site useless.
Outside links are massively de-boosted to the point where no one sees a Tweet if it includes a link. This kills the connectivity aspect of the site. The Town Square cannot be a place where linking to the rest of the internet is banned.
Algo changes to X have also driven away the regular user.
The biggest accounts syphon views from smaller accounts. This means that users no longer see their friends’ posts or people they actually know. Instead, feeds are full of Elon’s buddies posting about Dogecoin or whatever his interests are that day.
These decisions have made X fairly pointless. It’s now less of a social media platform and more akin to Buzzfeed clickbait from a decade ago. There is not much reason to invest in a place like X. It’s no longer the Internet Town Square.
But I still yearn for that old Twitter feel…
Finding Old Twitter
When Musk first took over Twitter, I heard about all the replacement sites. I was dubious that any of them would actually become popular enough to truly replace the platform.
I knew some accounts would leave Twitter due to Musk’s ownership, but I could not foresee just how much his decisions would render the site unusable.
As more abandoned the platform, I caved and started a Mastodon account. It seemed to be the most interesting of the replacement options at the time. I got bored with that site after a few days. It just did not have the critical mass to drive a worthwhile network effect.
Obviously, I have started a Substack, as you are reading my post here. I find the platform good for long-form writing, but it does not have the same kind of instant quick-take reaction stuff that defined old Twitter.
I also find the Tweet feature here called Notes to be fairly useless. It’s hard to search for anything relevant, and the site mostly pushes meta-posts about how to grow Substack subscribers. I will mostly stick to long-from posts here at College Towns.
Enter Bluesky
Since I already had struck out on two other social media sites to replace old Twitter, I was dubious of Bluesky. Despite what a lot of mutual followers on X were telling me, I held out far too long.
But I eventually made an account on Bluesky this past week with my same PoliticsAndEd handle.
I immediately regretted not making one sooner, as I was greeted by old friends who had vanished from X. There were robust conversations on both higher education and urbanism. “It seemed like this really was Old Twitter anew!” I thought to myself.
I had that feeling for about two hours, and then I saw the cracks in Bluesky that critics had been warning on the X platform. Suddenly, my account was labeled as ‘Spam’, ending the fun.
This meant that every single one of my posts were hidden as spam. I had no warning nor indication of what was considered spam. I had followed about 45 accounts, mostly my old Twitter follows that I saw on the listed Starter Packs, which Bluesky promotes to help ease the transfer from the dying site.
I had sent out a few messages, two of which contained a link to my Substack article recognizing Twitter’s death. I assume that I was auto-flagged because the article had the word ‘dead’ in it or something. I never heard for sure what I did to earn the label though.
I was in Spam Jail for about a week. It was a frustrating experience. I was hearing all my former pals from Twitter claiming how cool the new site was. I was seeing the Bluesky CEO talk about how open things were. The new site was being celebrated. Meanwhile, I was locked away.
I tried to appeal the label via the site function, but my requests were ignored for a week. To the credit of the Bluesky moderation team, once I directly emailed my appeal, they did remove the label within 20 minutes. If you are reading this and had the spam label misapplied, make sure to email and not report through the site.
Being in Spam Jail did give me some perspective about the site’s usability and possible future. I dug in a bit more on some of the critiques I had been hearing.
Over-Moderated at Bluesky
The main critique of Bluesky is that it is a self-contained echo chamber. With Musk taking over X, it is seen as a social media for the Right. That means Bluesky has been called a social media for the Left.
One reason for this echo chamber critique is that Bluesky is heavily moderated. Below, I have provided all the ways in which users can change their personal feeds with these labels and moderation tools.
While I understand wanting to prohibit NSFW content from a feed, much of the labels are fairly subjective. On the surface, you may think, “yes, I do not want rude comments on my feed.” But then take a step back and ask how that is calculated. What is the metric that equals rudeness? Can the label tell if someone is being sarcastic? Is sarcasm being rude?
As it works right now, if an account receives one of these labels, every post they make are under this category. If someone gets labeled as Rude, all of their posts will have that label and will not be shown to anyone with the setting to ‘Warn’ or ‘Hide’ Rude accounts. It doesn’t matter if they are sharing puppies or wishing grandma a happy birthday, they are entirely Rude under the label.
Since I was labeled ‘Spam’, my entire page was basically un-viewable. One of my old followers tried to find me and my handle wouldn’t populate in the search. This is the same thing that could happen to any of the labels.
It is easy to see how moderation can go overboard. This is apparently already happening, as I found a bunch of other accounts complaining about the same mislabelling. Even some Palestinian activist groups have been complaining that their accounts have been unduly labeled as spam.
The journalists
, who has been loathed by large portion of various lefty circles, had a similar label applied to him. His Bluesky account will largely be hidden on the site moving forward.Given that Bluesky is touting this kind of moderation as central to the site’s experience, I do not expect them to change. In fact, a lot of people seem to really like these features! It is a social media site for those who want a more curated and targeted experience.
Red X and Blue Echo
A site with considerable moderation is totally fine and reasonable—it just doesn’t equate to a social media platform that is bound to become the new Internet Town Square like old Twitter.
Just because X is bad now doesn't mean Bluesky is good yet. In fact, I see some relation to Musk’s X in Bluesky. On X, my links get de-boosted by the algo; on Bluesky, my links may go unread due to moderation. Different reasons, same effect.
That being said, I am still having fun on Bluesky. The site is certainly trending upwards. There are some legit niche communities that are already robust and thriving. I will continue to use the platform and invest some time there, while winding down X.
To illustrate my point, I did a test with the same post at the same time on X and Bluesky. My X account with almost 15K followers received 2 likes, while my Bluesky account with around 100 followers received 1 like. Both bad engagement! But at least the new site has potential. X is hemorrhaging users.
The new challenger is better than some of the other hopefuls, even if it still has a long way to go. Bluesky will continue to grow as a social media platform, while X will continue to shrivel.
In the end, I am not looking for a social media platform that is exclusively for the Left or Right. I want something with a broad social network effect. We are left with Red X and Blue Echo: Two social media platforms that look very similar, both promising to be the Internet Town Square, and each missing the mark.
For now, the search for Old Twitter continues…