It’s called Bluesky, it is a new social networkwas born in 2019 within Twitter, became independent in 2021 but only between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 came out of the beta phase and was accessible to everyone.
There is a lot of interest around Bluesky (so much so that in first day open to the public has gathered around 1 million users) both due to its nature as a decentralized platform and because those who support it also include Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and currently a member of the board of directors. From Bluesky, not from Twitter. Which is a bit the same thing anyway, as we will see.
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How to sign up for Bluesky
Bluesky is accessible both through the bsky.app website both as an app for iOS and Android, which is the one we used for the first registration: you cannot take advantage of the function Login Con (i.e. you cannot use login credentials from other platforms), but you just have to choose an email, a username and a password and you are inside.
In this phase of low crowding, an undoubted advantage is that “first come, first served”, and therefore we are relatively You are free to choose the username you prefer and what you have in mind, something that is now impossible to do on the most crowded platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, Gmail and even Twitter.
After registration and email verification (which can also be completed at a later time) you will be faced with a series of screens in which to provide an overview of your interestswhich should serve Bluesky to suggest some accounts to follow and also to populate the feed. The section For youto use a now popular expression.
The Washington Post’s Twitter page The Washington Post’s Bluesky page
It looks like Twitter but it’s not Twitter
Having chosen some topics, we immediately noticed two things: first of all, that Bluesky isn’t just an alternative to Twitter, it’s Twitter. In the sense that it is objectively identical to the social network that Musk decided to call X: he remembers it graphically in the choice of the (few) colors, in the arrangement of posts and icons, in the organization of the menus. And he follows it perfectly on the user pages: at the top a horizontally developed image, the round photo of the profile, a short one descriptioni numbers of follows, followers and posts, as well division into columns between Posts, Replies and Contents. Everything is the same as the comma, so much so that it is a little disturbing.
The other aspect that struck us is the desolation: there is very little about Bluesky, few people, few companies, few newspapers. Little of everything or even none at all, if we speak in and about Italian: our topic pages were totally empty and white until (as suggested by the app itself) we changed the language setting and also added English. At that point you feel a little less alone, but just barely. Also because, and here lies perhaps the other and more important problem of Bluesky, it is not well understood why someone has to come and keep us company.
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Two advantages that become two disadvantages
As already mentioned, the two attractive forces of Bluesky are the fact of being an alternative to Twitter and the fact of being decentralized. Except that both honestly seem uninteresting to the common user.
On the first point, Dorsey’s creature is over a year late: in the autumn of 2022 it was already there Mastodon (here is our user guide) and in mid-2023 Threads also arrived, which began last December it is also accessible from Italy. Both are more than valid alternatives to Twitter, also because both can boast the other (alleged) peculiarity of Bluesky, i.e. decentralization.
Right at the end of 2023, we dedicated an entire page (this) to explain what it means the term, here it is enough to remember that the most well-known social networks, from Facebook to Instagram, to TikTok, are all centralized and isolated from each other: to follow a person on Facebook and communicate with them we must necessarily have a Facebook account, which we can only use there. Net of shares, what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook. And the same goes for all the other major social networks. On decentralized platforms the opposite happens: to simplify, users can communicate with each other, and possibly even follow each other, regardless of where they registered their account.
From a theoretical point of viewit’s an advantage and it’s definitely interesting. From a practical point of view, at least for the moment and limited to Bluesky, seemed a bit useless to us precisely due to the scarcity of the contents present. Only time will tell if they will grow, and if those who have built a treasure trove of followers on Twitter, Threads or elsewhere will want to take risks and commit to starting everything again all over again. We don’t understand why, but maybe it happens.
@capoema