Why Bluesky Feels Like the Future of Social Media

You'll know from reading my blog that am I'm a huge supporter of decentralised social media and, like most ex-Twitter users, I followed the crowd and hopped onto the Bluesky bandwagon and, so far, my experience has been really positive. It's been also most a week do far and I love Bluesky. It really does feel like the future.

It's official! #BlueSky20M

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— James Ashford (@jrashford.com) 19 November 2024 at 14:06

It just feels like a breath of fresh air compared to X/Twitter, and certainly the best for microblogging experience I've had in a while. Just like old-school Twitter in the 2010s. In fact, I'm going to take this a step further make by making a bold assertion and say that Bluesky is, in fact, better than Mastodon and that ATProto (the decentralised protocol behind Bluesky) is better than ActivityPub.

My Favourite Features

Bluesky is packed full of useful and novel features which really makes the platform standout from its competitors as well as being quite innovate too. Without going into all the features, here are just a few of my favourite features.

Starter Packs

Starter packs are a useful feature of Bluesky where buy users create a collection "a starter pack" of users to followers for those wanting to join the network. Bluesky describes starter packs as invites which "allow you to bring friends directly into your slice of Bluesky!"

Custom feeds

This is a feature I like quite a lot. With some technical skill, users can create their own feeds by collating posts from particular users or from hashtags and keys which others can subscribe to. Custom feeds also support different methods "algorithms" of ranking content (e.g. chronological or popularity).

Labelling

This feature I'm particularly interested in from a moderation perspective. Bluesky supports the notion of labelling as a tool for allowing users to annotate content (e.g. a post or user) as part of Bluesky's community-driven "Composable Moderation" approach. I'll probably make another posts on this.

Open API

From a research perspective, the Open API and supported SDKs make it possible developers to build for third-party services and process data to top of the Bluesky platform. For example, I've used the firehose to stream and built networks of followers, reposts and replies in real-time using the atproto Python package.

Bluesky going forward

I've said before that I'm a firm believers that federated, or decentralised, social media is the future of social media. Now that Bluesky has reach over 20M people, I feel like we're slowly achieving our vision of a better and more open the social web.

It's clear that, in the past week or so, people are starting to look for something different and, in the process, are slowing coming to see the benefits of the open web over the walled garden alternative. It's gaining lots of support among the public, and not just from internet nerds like myself.

All this being said, I'm sure at some point bad actors will participate on the platform in an attempt to disrupt normal discourse. This will be the real test for Bluesky's composable labelling system for moderation.