How the Twitter Abnormality of Berduck’s Tweet Goes Unresolved: What Happens if Bluesky Is Done?
If Bluesky is willing to let third-party programmers build features in its platform, it will show off the benefits of being a self-employed company without having to worry about user headaches.
Over the past six months Musk has caused a flood of talent and money into social networking companies. Among the apps attempting to capitalize on Twitter’s decline are Post, T2, Artifact, Mastodon, and a still-untitled effort from Instagram.
The concept of decentralization causes most folks’ eyes to glaze over, understandably: the concept is almost as unwieldy as the word itself. You got benefit from a domino effect if you used the social network in the early days. Twitter’s ecosystem grew larger, and its service improved faster, because an ecosystem of developers congregated and worked on it together.
New social networks often require some novel mechanic to captivate attention and drive daily usage. The version Bluesky was able to find was a bug that had been in place for a while over the weekend, notifying people who’d responded to a thread when someone else replied. Users were able to turn it off. But for a few days, the thread went wild with nudes, a text-based game of tic-tac-toe, and the popular Bluesky character Berduck, “an account that represent[s] a duck writing in baby voice that used artificial intelligence to reply to any user’s skeet with a question.”
All of this is supremely silly, of course. It is silly in the way a social network needs to reach liftoff. The absurdity of the thread encouraged a kind of general, free-floating absurdity in the app over the weekend, as users cast off the political warfare and engagement hacks that have defined it in recent months.
All of this could be seen to any user of the platform, via the handy “What’s Hot” tab, through which they could peruse a chaotic feed of popular posts. Until Monday, much of what was “hot” involved nude photos, which for all the flaws in content moderation that represents was a great growth tactic while it lasted. (For the poster and for Bluesky.)
The Elusive, Slaphappy, and All That in Pre-Minimum Musk Social Media: A Discussion with Mastodon and Bluesky
It should not disturb average users with its nature. Most users will be perfectly happy to use the company’s default server for a long time to come. The company needs to make it easy to find friends if the app opens up to other server using its custom protocol. (Mastodon today finally took that hint, announcing it would begin to add new users to a default server without requiring them to choose.)
There is an infectious energy like everyone chugged a Red Bull on a Friday afternoon and the boss is out of town. Users are calling their posts “skeets” because of the way they are created. (Threaded posts are “ropes.”) The vibe reminds me of the days when Clubhouse was invite-only and looked like it would be a big deal.
The New York Times Magazine editor said the current environment of pre- Musk social media was akin to a dinner party where only the serious drinkers remained. I was scrolling Bluesky this weekend and thought of that comparison. The new app has a loose, slaphappy quality too—but it’s more like the part of a dinner party where everyone has had two or three martinis but hasn’t eaten food yet, when it seems like absolutely anything could happen that night.