Bluesky: What riled people up about a U.S. senator when he called him out loud after he complained about being skeet?
Without the relentless din of conflict and harassment that propagates throughout Twitter, posting on Bluesky tended to be less adversarially flavored, though drama and discourse were, of course, inevitable. Users debated whether the New York Times columnist had gone too far when he said someone was being chronically obnoxious in his replies.
The CEO of the company asked people to stop calling posts “skeets” in the middle of the chaos on Thursday. The interface only refers to posts. Unfortunately, this plea from on high only provoked users — many of whom were from the most recent influx of Twitter refugees — to insist that posts were definitely skeets.
By Monday, CNN anchor Jake Tapper would ask his guests to respond to a statement made by Sen. Brian Schatz, the first — but not only — US senator on Bluesky. “Senator Brian Schatz, just, uh, skeeted, on Bluesky,” said Tapper live on air before reading the skeet out loud.
Bluesky was initially funded, but is now a stand-alone company. As on Mastodon, the decentralized structure was meant to be its selling point; it was designed so that no one person can own or control it and users can create their own apps and communities within it. Bluesky was also designed with interoperability in mind, so it may someday allow cross-posting from other apps (like Twitter, if it still exists).
Jay Graber said via her Bluesky account that the developers had been juggling between moderation and federation as priorities, only a couple of hours after asking people to stop calling posts skeets. The platform is admittedly without a number of standard features that help curb harassment. The block function wasn’t added as the user base jumped in size.
This was not ideal for anyone, but it was especially not ideal for pundit and blogger Matt Yglesias, formerly of Vox.com and now a successful Substack writer. Yiasgles has a history of saying a number of opinions, all of which are absolutely dunkable. It’s not clear exactly what riled people up on Bluesky about Yglesias, though some cited his attitude toward trans rights issues. Regardless, on Thursday, his posts were under fire, with over a hundred replies ranging from merely hostile to descriptively violent. A user who identified herself as a teen girl told another that they were going to beat you with hammers.
What is or isn’t online harassment is a tricky distinction, but platforms frequently draw the line at direct calls to violence, even if the tone is one of shitposting. Hannah cheerfully stated she was engaged in a category of offense that can be punished by a ban. She was banned immediately afterwards, so she couldn’t be reached for comment.
Graber said that those who had taken down accounts from their server will be welcome to join other users in the federation. The hammer symbol was added to the person’s username in honor of Hannah.
The Bluesky Experience: How the Hell isn’t? A Conversation with Apple, Ocasio-Cortez, and Rian Johnson
Within 24 hours, the Bluesky developers had deployed a change to their codebase that added blocking as a function. The update to the app was held up in the App Store because it was not available in the browser version. According to a post by Bluesky developer Paul Frazee, Apple wanted to do a deeper review, perhaps because of the platform’s suddenly high profile.
Participation in the hell thread would sign you up for an enormous number of notifications, and attempts to obscure the thread for yourself were almost useless since some of the accounts were going to unmute them anyway. Users tried to bait each other by tagging them in. They themselves were in hell as a result. Delighted in part by seeing the CEO herself good-naturedly participate before publicly notifying her devs of what kind of bugs she was seeing, others began to post their nudes right into the hellthread until it was nothing but asses and errors.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrived on Bluesky on Thursday, as did the internet’s most revered poster, @dril. Jake Tapper was the first to show up, followed by MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan. “Real psycho hours, just how we like it,” Hayes skeeted, impressed by the terrifying chaos unfolding on the feed.
Manning was talking about the virtues of decentralization. Director Rian Johnson demanded to see the hellthread. Abbott Elementary’s Quinta Brunson arrived and then was briefly, incorrectly flagged as fake, which wreathed her avatar with a hot pink exclamation mark. An account for the pope was flagged as a fake.
There were big names doing strange things, but for the most part, the feed was non-famous people making jokes, being weird, and posting their butts. Even with the service breaking down sporadically, blocks still being nonexistent on the iOS app, and unclothed ass everywhere, the mood was jubilant and upbeat. It really feels great to experience a platform without hate groups trying to find every post. Rian Johnson put it more concisely in one of his posts — “This is funner than Twitter.”
A person who might be used to seeing their tweets rack up a hundred retweets in an hour was in for an emotional learning curve. The “What’s Hot” tab, a universal feed of most-interacted-with content, regardless of whether you follow the poster, included posts with as few as 15 likes. The funniest, most irony-poisoned posters of the internet were now unironically and joyfully posting and reposting pictures of dogs, cats, and pet pigs and were perfectly happy to get just a handful of likes and replies.
People tend to open their homes to other people. (For example, I invited journalists, my own local media, and because I thought it would be funny, also Brian Schatz.) At some point in the invite tree, the invitations had begun to skew heavily toward the trans community — possibly because trans users were the most desperate to get away from Twitter, where moderation policies and practices have shifted away from protecting them from harassment.
On Saturday, the user was hellbent on starting trouble. They were soon in a uproar as rood made their way from person to person offending and denigrating everyone they could find. No one has the right to access an invite only closed alpha, and anyone who creates an account to harass people will be removed, said Graber. Unlike with Hannah of the hammers, she did not remind anyone that ryanlee could possibly return in the federated future.
The invite-only Bluesky attracted unscrupulous people to brute force codes to get into it. The flow of invites has slowed because of the need to revoked and re-envision them in a more secure format. On eBay, codes could be found for as much as $400. Author William Gibson resorted to begging on Twitter for an invite.
A technical advisor to the bluesky team announced on Monday that they would be implementing a policy of no boobs or dicks on whats hot. When asked for clarification, he said posts would be filtered through AI to detect nudity.
Is there any difference between a policy driven human moderation of harassment and a grand scheme to automate moderation, even though it’s in the works? Can Bluesky be called a service provider and builder of a protocol instead of just another platform, despite having an apathetic trust and safety department? And what on earth is federation even going to look like?
The thing people like the most about Bluesky seems to be the energy — a slippery, ever-changing thing, wholly reliant on fortune’s whims. She is there because she likes posting about Stardew Valley and she likes commenting on strangers’ dresses. Will Bluesky ever reach its final form without killing its own vibe?
What makes it special? When you log in to the app (there’s no desktop experience yet) that’s not immediately apparent. Bluesky looks like a stripped-down version of Twitter, missing features like drafts, a “block” button, and direct messages. It’s easy to use, but that’s because it’s so unoriginal—if you’ve ever tweeted, you’ll be familiar with the interface. It’s decentralized, but that’s not unique either; Mastodon is too. Mastodon was an early front-runner for Replacement Twitter but it wasn’t long before it was seen as a niche product. (Too confusing!)
Instead, there’s a fizzy, infectious fuck-around energy, like everyone chugged a Red Bull on a Friday afternoon and the boss is out of town. Users call their posts “skeets” when they are playfully creating their own jargon. Threaded posts areropes. The vibe reminds me of the weeks when Clubhouse was invite-only and looked like the next big thing, before it got overrun by hustle culture gurus and crypto entrepreneurs.
In a New York Times Magazine eulogy for pre-Musk Twitter, the editor said that the platform was the part of the dinner party when only the serious drinkers remained. I thought of that comparison while scrolling Bluesky this weekend. The new app is like adinner party where everyone has eaten a couple of martinis, but not much else, and then there’s the next night and everything could happen.