BlueSky is a cautionary tale of demand-side enshittification
Introducing The Fragile
Heads up!
We can’t talk about the communication platforms which support the majority of the world’s political discourse without mentioning the politics they cover, lest the writing become so abstract, so tortured by euphemism and oblique allusion that extracting the thesis from the word salad becomes a puzzle. Thus, I leave it up to you, my dear reader, to use your judgement and good sense. If you’re reading this article, you probably have both.
That’s a fancy way of saying that this article will make mention of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, as well as passing references to the whole “gender” thing. None of this should be taken as an endorsement of any partisan viewpoint. The only politics I am endorsing in this article are the politics of free speech. And on that issue, I am militant.
If you’re one of my readers, then this is already understood, but on the modern internet, a hellscape of context collapse, there will inevitably be terminally-onlines who stumble across my writings. This warning is for them.
If the mere mention of the aforementioned hot-button topics gives you a case of the vapors, I advise you find the nearest adult coloring book and an 8-pack of Crayolas, and get to scribbling. Try to color inside the lines. That’s what they’re there for.
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln…
How do we most succinctly recap the 15 minutes of BlueSky? The chart below is a good start.
BlueSky rose and fell because of partisan politics and the culture war. Though it was started in 2019—that pre-COVID, pre-X Arcadia with little connection to the political landscape of today—it nonetheless became a refuge from Elon Musk’s X and rallying point for the political left in the run up to (and aftermath of) the 2024 Presidential election. It was nothing before the election season, and it is slowly but surely dwindling back toward nothing. It is, truly, a nothingburger.
But for a time, the mainstream media, including that existing well outside the terminally-online bubble where we’d expect such discourse to be contained, would not shut up about how BlueSky was going to drive X into X-tinction. BlueSky was the future. BlueSky was the rebirth of social media. BlueSky was the Promised Land.
Then enshittification came. It came, and it destroyed whatever potential BlueSky had. But, unlike at almost every other company, the enshittification didn’t come from within. It came from without.
The Fragile
It has long been my contention that enshittification, in particular the enshittification of digital services, is the result of not just top-down (corporate) forces, but also bottom-up (popular) forces. In a previous article, I made the case that techbros, a specific species of young, usually male, professionals sharing a common ideology that includes:
a blind faith in the beneficence of large tech conglomerates
a reflexive preference for more complicated technological solutions over simpler, more practical ones
a fetishization of delicate, minimalist aesthetics, even at the expense of usability
a general contempt for anyone to whom the above three things don’t apply
There may be some overlap with the billionaire overlords who are most typically associated with enshittification, but for the most part, these techbros exist significantly further downstream economically. Despite that, they exert a disproportionate influence on the design of technology, not least because the average billionaire would rather vegetate on a yacht than micromanage the design of a content delivery algorithm. One would have assumed that was common knowledge.
So now that we have established that demographics further down the economic totem pole influence the shape of our technology, I’d like to introduce a different demographic. If the plutocrats and the techbros represent supply-side enshittification, this faction exists largely on the demand side of the equation. But who are they?
The people of whom I speak share in common with the techbros an upbringing defined by excessive safety and affirmation. It’s how they responded to this upbringing that sets them apart. They are characterized by:
poor emotional regulation
a consequent inability to separate facts from feelings that nerfs any intellectual capacity they may have
a terror of different viewpoints and opinions to the point of wanting to forcibly silence anyone who does not think exactly the same
a stridently dystopian, dysgenic worldview in which the forward progress of mankind itself is an enemy to be annihilated
One might naively expect this psychographic to be limited to independent coffeeshops staffed and patronized by callow trustafarians, pungent bedrooms belonging to twentysomething NEETs testing the patience of their beleaguered parents, and mental institutions.
If only.
The reality is that the technology industry is equally as infested by these types as it is by the techbros. How they ever got a toehold in the business is beyond my ken, but once a few were in, they opened the gates for the rest. Now they are everywhere. They tend to occupy a more diverse set of roles within tech than do the techbros, and so would be even harder to extirpate.
Just like the techbros, this group exerts an undue influence on the technology imposed on the modern world. As technologists, they directly shape the products, and as consumers, they whisper (or, more likely, yell) in the ear of an industry which seems to think that regular Americans don’t exist.
I call these people The Fragile. They were the rise, and now they are the fall, of BlueSky.
What happened to BlueSky anyway?
Before I really get into a detailed, gory postmortem of BlueSky, I want to explore the most charitable, steel-man interpretation of why it rose so quickly, and why it had so much Astroturfing help from the mainstream media. Here’s my best shot:
Believing that Elon Musk had weaponized X as a propaganda channel that curated the most virulent right-wing conspiracy theories for the turn-key radicalization of American voters, thus facilitating the re-election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office, liberal Twitter users fled X en masse for a platform that promised a fresh start. A place that was decentralized, not subject to the whims of a lunatic centibillionaire, that allowed people to filter their feeds to taste, presumably to pre-empt the kind of hate-filled rhetoric they were running away from.
BlueSky sounded like a great concept. It was pitched as a protocol, not a platform. That means that multiple platforms could autonomously operate, using that same protocol. This meant competition, alternatives. People could even bring their friends and content with them between platforms. Better yet, it let users build their own algorithms, determining what content they would see and what they wouldn’t. You could even choose your own moderation services rather than relying on a central authority. These are ideas that I have been championing for a long time. How could this not succeed?
Well, for one reason, all of those things I listed were just vaporware.
To start with, the BlueSky open protocol was not launched when BlueSky started getting the hype. This meant that you could not start your own BlueSky instance. The only instance was the main app, meaning that BlueSky was just a regular, vanilla centralized platform like any other. No distributed moderation, no custom feeds, no other servers you can move to. Just the promise of decentralization someday.
But, apparently, that mere promise was enough to attract a vanguard of users who were probably already inclined to get off Twitter, mainly because it was legacy Web 2.0 than for any specifically partisan reason. It was this early success that allowed BlueSky to show up on the radar when millions of disaffected terminally-onlines found themselves searching for a refuge from X. This is when the trouble began.
A little bit of history for those with short memories
Before I get to the rest of the BlueSky story, I need to provide you with a historical refresher.
Inevitably, Elon Musk’s present public image is shaped by his recent erratic, ketamine-addled behavior and his (until recently) chummy relationship with Donald Trump. Thanks to the time-dilating effects of online life, it feels like that’s how it’s always been. That’s why it pays to revisit the recent past and see how much has changed.
There are a few things you need to know about pre-2022 Twitter. The first is that it was run by Parag Agrawal, a goofy dweeb with the charisma of a wad of chewed gum. If small D energy showed up on Geiger counters, Comrade Dyatlov would claim it was 3.6 Roentgens. His most famous quote will forever remain:
"Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation… and to focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed."
Twitter did not even resort to the hackneyed “fire in a crowded theatre” defense. It was unapologetically opposed to the freedom of speech. In addition to overt sensorship, they engaged in sketchy practices like algorithmic shadowbanning which means that no one person can be held accountable. Twitter actively denied these practices, even when caught red-handed, further undermining any sort of moral legitimacy they may have been pantomiming with their “trust and safety” policies. The fact that their “moderation” had an obvious ideological bias is icing on the cake.
That bias did not end with moderation, either. The infamous “blue checkmarks”, which were supposed to be simply a way of ensuring that an account claiming to be a well-known figure was in fact that person, had mutated into a perverse, terminally-online badge of prestige. Unsurprisingly, many people on one side of the political spectrum were denied blue checks even when they met the “notability” criteria. In short Old Twitter was a digital banana republic.
This was the context in which Elon announced his intention to buy Twitter. Whatever his real motives may have been, his stated purpose was to bring free speech to Twitter. And that stated purpose matters.
Those of us who cheered Musk’s hostile takeover were not all fanboys. Our motivation was less a love of Elon Musk, and more a desire to see Twitter brought to justice. We couldn’t wait to see Parag waddling out of the Twitter headerquarters for the last time. We couldn’t wait to see internal documents detailing their censorship policies made public, hopefully with some embarrassing secrets included. We couldn’t wait for all the “moderators” who had enforced their shady policies, to be tossed out on their rear ends, hopefully with cause. We couldn’t have imagined anyone would feel differently.
So, imagine our shock when there was a massive public freakout in response, and the single most repeated grievance among the anti-Elon crowd was… I wish I were making this up… “free speech”! Of all the things they could have mentioned. All of Elon Musk’s business blunders, political entanglements, even scandals from his past, that people could bring up as a reason to oppose his purchase of Twitter, and they singled out FREEDOM OF FUCKING SPEECH.
The lack of self-awareness only continued from there, when further freakouts over Elon selling blue checkmarks for $8 a month. Those of us who recognized Old Twitter’s system as a corrupt racket could only laugh. Most of us would never waste our money on it. We just loved seeing the legacy blue checks melt down over their precious status symbols losing all meaning. Did the Elon haters concede that the old system needed to be overhauled? Not even. They were fine with its inequities. We learned a lot about who the Twitter People were from the Musk buyout.
What happens when The Fragile hijack a social network?
Amusingly, for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Twitter People didn’t immediately leave Twitter when Elon Musk took over. Inertia is a powerful thing. The occasional alternative platform would appear, and spark a brief interest from the Twitter People, but nothing was enough to spark a mass exodus. Mastodon was too complicated and confusing. Threads was too closely tied to Facebook. It would take a perfect storm to draw a critical mass of people away from Twitter, now X.
That storm arrived in autumn 2024. Two things happened around this time, BlueSky had ended its invite-only beta and opened itself to the public, and Trump was rapidly pulling ahead in the Presidential race. Trump was a proxy for Elon Musk, and thus his ascendancy drove a fresh wave of anti-Musk sentiment. And it was that confluence which finally triggered a mass migration from X to BlueSky. When Trump won the election, the migration turned into a flood.
But here’s the thing. The exodus from Twitter wasn’t really about Trump. It was about Old Twitter. It was about avenging their lost homeland. The bulk of the population movement into BlueSky was from the most terminally online, the most toxic, the most Fragile people from Old Twitter who were looking to build a new order, fueled by revanchist zeal, that would be the logical end conclusion of where Old Twitter was headed before Musk interrupted its course.
What does that new order look like?
That right there is pure, molecular-distilled Old Twitter.
The first thing The Fragile did upon arriving at BlueSky was to start reporting stuff. It’s what they do. They wanted to spread their misery wherever they went. If they saw a stray piece of freedom lying around, they got out the Hoover and made it disappear.
For their part, this is where BlueSky’s unrealized ambitions of being a decentralized system came back to haunt them. They were still a centralized platform at this point, but their skeleton moderation crew was scaled to the assumption that moderation was meant to be delegated to third parties running their own BlueSky instances. Before such a thing could happen, a horde of emotionally damaged scolds had beaten down their doors and were overwhelming them with reports.
Reminder: mentioning viewpoints is not an endorsement of said viewpoints
Soon, numerous users were being banned without even having broken the rules of the platform. They would find their accounts deleted, with no e-mail, no cause listed, nothing. There was a clear pattern in who was being banned. A well-known channel was banned within 30 seconds for posting “There are only two genders”. This post was made in isolation, and was not targeted at any user, nor was it an attempt to mis-gender any individual. Another well-known conservative commentator was banned immediately upon signing up without even posting anything that could conceivably be said to break a rule. Users were being banned for activity that had happened off the platform.
But if you think all this means that BlueSky was a safe space for all, think again. Journalist Jesse Singal was bombarded by explicit death threats and doxxing by a horde of unhinged incels and, when he tried contacting the company, it took hours to get any sort of action. And that “action” consisted of temporarily suspending the ringleader of the incels, leaving the others untouched (meaning they could continue to spread an address that didn’t even belong to Singal but some completely unrelated person).
Even being generally on their side doesn’t keep you safe, though. Mark Cuban, who was a Harris supporter in the 2024 election, and presumably not a fan of Elon Musk’s management of X, became dismayed with the psychotic behavior of the Fragile, and commented, constructively, “The moderation and block tools on here are so advanced, if you see someone you don’t want to see on here, just block them. Don’t attack them.” The response from the locals? “Go wipe your crocodile tears with a wad of hundreds you twat”, and “Fuckin leave then, pussy.”
In the space of a few weeks, BlueSky had turned into Old Twitter times a thousand. The selective enforcement of rules, lack of due process or transparency, and hate-filled mob mentality are exactly what these people want. Except that now they aren’t fettered by even the limp-wristed checks and balances that were present at Twitter. The Fragile have actually managed to annex a substantial chunk of digital land, and the local government is too weak to do anything about it.
This is what happens when you let the lunatics run the asylum
In the end, the reason that BlueSky is collapsing was because The Fragile tried to immanentize the eschaton by Zerg-rushing a brittle digital platform and imposing end-stage Maoism, but vastly overestimated that platform’s cultural influence. BlueSky is not a keystone species in the digital ecosystem. While megaplatforms seem to thrive on enshittification, small, non-entrenched platforms like BlueSky wither and die from it.
The downfall of BlueSky shows us a rare (or rarely so clear) example of demand-side enshittification. This is when a large, motivated demographic influences the nature of a product, either by loudly screaming for changes to that product, or by influencing the product directly, which can happen in social media where “the user is the product”.
This is a cautionary tale, not just about the susceptibility of digital products to distortion by aggressive and motivated demographics, but about The Fragile themselves. Social media has the tendency to generate mob behavior, which is devoid of strategy, devoid of thought at all. That played a role in why they failed in their mission to hijack the global town square. When they aren’t concentrated in their own open space like BlueSky, they may actually be capable of some degree of planning and nuance. This makes them dangerous.
We now know that a frighteningly large number of people in the tech industry hold views that are utterly incompatible with the design of technology. They are still there. Still designing. Still programming. Still managing.
People who don’t believe in free speech, due process, blind justice, liberal society, the marketplace of ideas, people who use the smoothbrained cliche, “mUh PrIvaT cUmPanY”, as a fig leaf for their degenerate totalitarian views have no place in the technology industry, and yet they are here among us.
Enshittification comes from all directions. If you are solely focused on the billionaires, or the Cybertruck-driving techbros, you might not notice their co-enshittifiers. They don’t resemble the others. They profess to hate capitalism, despite working for large companies. They claim to despise technology, despite contributing to its creation. They might even use the term “enshittification” because their pathologically sincere brains cannot process irony. But they are enshittifiers all the same.
Put it this way. You don’t want to be saying in three years “first they came for BlueSky and I did not speak out".”