After an hour of scrolling through Bluesky the other night, I felt something I haven’t felt on social media in a long time: free.

Free from Elon Musk and his tedious quest to turn the social platform X into a Right-wing echo chamber where he and his friends are the permanent, inescapable main characters. Free from Threads and its suffocating algorithm, which suppresses news and real-time discussions in favour of bland engagement bait. Free from my own bad habit, honed through years of obsessive Twitter use, of packaging my thoughts for consumption by an audience of opinionated strangers.

You may be wondering why Bluesky — started in 2019 under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, before becoming an independent company in 2021 — is attracting so much attention.

In the past several weeks, the app has swelled to more than 20 million users, and is adding more than 1 million users a day. It’s been the top-ranked free app on both Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Celebrities, politicians and artists are flocking to it. Its 20-person team can barely keep up with all the growth.

For burned-out social media users like me, joining Bluesky can be a reset — a chance to start over on a platform that isn’t engineered to maximise engagement, that isn’t owned by a capricious billionaire or an amoral advertising conglomerate, and that doesn’t treat its users as lab rats. It’s a throwback to a rawer, lower-stakes era of social media, before elections and economies hinged on what happened there.

And while Bluesky is still small compared with X and Threads — Musk claimed in May that X had 600 million monthly active users, and Threads recently reported having roughly 275 million users — it has a vitality right now that other Twitter replacements lack.

I’ve been wrong about social apps before. I thought Clubhouse, the pandemic-era hit that convened socially starved techies for glorified conference calls, would have staying power.

But I suspect Bluesky’s growth is a sign that text-based social media is less dead than I thought and that there is still plenty of demand for the kind of social networking experience that Twitter offered before Musk took it over.

For the uninitiated, some Bluesky basics: on the surface, the app resembles a stripped-down version of Twitter. Users post short messages with text, photos or videos. There are followers, likes and reshares. Many new users build out their lists by adding groups of accounts known as “starter packs”. There are starter packs for journalists, soccer fans, legal experts, nephrologists, database engineers, Pokémon fans and more. The platform has added features like direct messages and an anti-harassment “nuclear block” option.

It gets more interesting under the hood, because Bluesky is built on top of something called the “AT Protocol”, a decentralised, open-source technology that is designed to let users control how they experience social media.

I think people who are nostalgic for the old Twitter should give Bluesky a shot, with a few caveats.

First, I must warn you that Bluesky is weird. It’s getting less weird by the day, but it’s still full of drama, inside jokes, not-safe-for-work images and quirky subcommunities, all of which can be jarring for newcomers.

Second, if what you’re looking for is a one-for-one substitute for the old Twitter — a global watering hole where celebrities, politicians, journalists, scientists and sports fans all gathered to discuss the news of the day — you won’t find it on Bluesky. (Or anywhere else, for that matter.)

We’re in an era of fractured social media now, where communities gather in different spaces for different purposes, and I suspect that Bluesky, no matter how popular it gets, will be only one part of a much larger ecosystem that includes X, Threads, group chats and more.

Third, the people who are getting the most out of Bluesky, aren’t the people who simply brought their existing social media presences over from other networks and continued posting.

They’re the people who are using Bluesky as a chance to reinvent themselves.

NYTNS