I have made an account on Bluesky three separate times now. Once in early 2023 when the invite codes were still a whole status symbol, once last winter when a bunch of tech journalists I follow jumped ship for a week, and now again, for real this time, over the past ten days or so.
The first two didn't stick. I'd log in, see a timeline of maybe fourteen people I recognized, feel the specific loneliness of a party where you only know the host, and close the tab. I bet a lot of you did the same thing.
This time is different, and honestly I don't think it's really about the election, even though that's obviously the trigger everyone's pointing to. Since November 5th the app has been adding new users so fast their own engineers have been posting about scaling issues, and I've seen the "15 million users" number thrown around this week like its a big milestone, which I guess it is for them. What actually got me to stay, though, is a feature that's been sitting there since the summer that nobody talked about much until now: Starter Packs.
A Starter Pack is just a curated list, basically a little bundle of accounts and a feed, that somebody puts together and you can follow all at once with one tap. Someone made a "tech journalists" pack, someone else made one for "people who write about baseball on the internet," and instead of showing up to an empty room you show up to a room where forty relevant people are already talking. It sounds like a small UX thing and it is a small UX thing, but it solves the exact cold-start problem that killed Bluesky for me twice already. Mastodon never solved this. Mastodon is still, four years after I first tried it, a series of walled gardens where the walls are the actual point, and I say that as someone who kept a Mastodon tab open for like six months in 2022 out of stubbornness alone.
I made my own pack this week, a small one, mostly indie blog people, the kind of folks who've been running personal sites since around when I started this one. Nine people took it. Nine! I was disproportionately pleased about that.
The other thing worth mentioning, because it happened the same week, is that The Guardian said it's stepping away from posting on X entirely, calling the platform toxic and not worth the trade-off anymore. That's a bigger, more institutional version of the same move a lot of individual people have been making quietly, moving their posting energy somewhere else without necessarily deleting the old account. I haven't deleted mine either, for what it's worth. I'm not doing the thing where you post a screenshot of your deactivation confirmation like it's a breakup announcement. I just open the other app more now.
Do I think this is the end of X? No, not really, and I'd be skeptical of anyone confidently telling you it is this week specifically. Network effects are stupidly durable and a lot of people who signed up for Bluesky this month will drift back to old habits by February the way half the Mastodon crowd did. What I do think is that the AT Protocol thing underneath Bluesky, the part where your identity and your follower graph aren't actually owned by the app, is a genuinely different bet than what Twitter or Mastodon were doing, and it's the first time I've felt like leaving a platform wouldn't mean starting completely from zero again. Whether that matters to normal people, versus just to nerds like me who care about protocols, is a separate question I don't have an answer to yet.
Also, small complaint while I'm here: the Bluesky iOS app still doesn't have a great way to browse Starter Packs from inside the app itself, you mostly find them because someone links one on the website version or pastes a URL into a post. For a feature that's clearly doing a lot of the heavy lifting in onboarding right now, it's weirdly buried. Fix that and I think the growth curve holds past the news cycle instead of snapping back once the election talk dies down.
Anyway. Come find me over there if you're around. I'm slow to post but I'm reading.