I did not think I'd be back on this particular hamster wheel, but here we are. Sometime Wednesday night I noticed my Twitter (sorry, X) timeline had gone even more feral than usual, and by Thursday half the people I actually follow for tech stuff had a little blue butterfly in their bio pointing to Bluesky. So I finally caved and made an account I'd been sitting on since the spring.
The numbers on this are wild if you like watching a platform inhale. Bluesky posted that it picked up something like a million new signups in about 48 hours this week, and for a couple of days it was sitting at number one on the App Store, ahead of ChatGPT and Threads and everything else. I don't fully trust any single-day app store ranking as a metric that means much long-term (remember when Clubhouse was going to replace radio forever), but a million people showing up in two days is not nothing.
What actually got me moving, though, wasn't the vibes. It was a browser extension called Sky Follower Bridge. You install it, log into both accounts, point it at your X following list, and it cross-references who's already on Bluesky and lets you bulk-follow them in one pass. I ran mine Thursday night with a beer next to the laptop and got back something like 140 matches out of maybe 900 people I follow on the other app. Not amazing, but enough that my timeline over there stopped being a ghost town within about ten minutes.
The good and the annoying, honestly
The good: no algorithm shoving quote-tweet dunks at me every three posts. Chronological by default, and if you want an algorithmic feed you opt into a specific one, like Discover, rather than it being force-fed to you. Custom feeds are genuinely the best feature of the whole platform. There's one that's just tech layoffs news, one that's just Rust programming posts, one that filters out anything with the word "thread" in it (bless whoever built that one). You can stack three or four of these as tabs across the top and basically hand-build the internet you want to read.
The annoying: it's still pretty empty outside of tech and media people, and half the jokes land with three replies instead of three hundred. I posted something dumb about my thermostat at 11pm last night and it got exactly one like, from a guy I went to college with who apparently also just joined. That's the whole platform in one anecdote right now — earnest, small, a little too online in that early-internet-forum way, which honestly I don't hate. I forgot what it felt like to post something and not immediately brace for a screenshot account to find it.
I'm not deleting my other account. I know some people are doing the dramatic full exit, deleting years of posts, the whole thing, and I get the impulse but I'm not there. Ten-plus years of replies and bad jokes and, more usefully, actual sourced links from beat reporters I still want in my feed — I'm not torching that over a bad week. I'm just going to be somewhere else more of the time, which feels like the actual honest description of what's happening to a lot of people right now, not some clean platform-to-platform migration story.
Side note, completely unrelated: I also spent forty-five minutes this week trying to remember why my RSS reader stopped pulling one particular feed, and it turned out the site had quietly switched their feed URL about eight months ago without a redirect. Eight months of just... not noticing. That's more embarrassing to admit than the Bluesky thing, honestly. I've been doing this blog since 2011 and I still manage to have blind spots the size of a barn door in my own reading setup.
Anyway. If you're over there, I'm using the same handle I've had everywhere for a decade, easy to find. Come yell about custom feeds with me. I'll probably write something in a few weeks about whether any of this actually sticks, because my honest guess is a good chunk of these million new accounts go dormant by New Year's. But for right now it's a nice, quiet, slightly overcaffeinated corner of the internet, and I'll take it.