Reviewed: Bluesky

The "left" Twitter alternative isn't that, and comes with its own toxic culture.

I am a little surprised that I haven’t seen these dots connected elsewhere, but let’s look at the facts. In October 2022, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey helped Elon Musk buy Twitter. He did this with every reason to believe that Musk would transform it into a right-dominated platform that would alienate liberals and leftists alike. Dorsey then pivoted and created a solution for the problem he had helped create, Bluesky, which through a selective invite system he rigged to be a liberal-left alternative to Twitter. Even during that process, however, Twitter paid Bluesky to design its protocol in such a way that it could eventually be merged with Twitter.

This isn’t a schism: it’s just Musk and Dorsey collaborating on a social engineering scheme. The idea seems to have been that if they could herd politically adversarial communities onto two technologically segregated user bases, they could then eventually reintegrate them in a way that made moderation easier. This strategy would also solve a thorny marketing problem: how do you attract a broad customer base when half of the customers don’t want the other half to use your service? The answer is that you make two different brands for two copies of the same project, and then reintegrate them in a way that makes users think they’re still in some sense distinct.