This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 9th, 2023. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Twitter challenger Bluesky is the internet’s latest hype. But don’t count on it succeeding. There are good reasons why new social media platforms rarely manage to scale.
Anyone who has ever been to a nightclub is familiar with the concept of “the queue.”
The logic is simple and well-tested. You keep the line outside deliberately long to create the impression of popularity. If that many people are waiting to get in, surely it can’t be bad? Until you finally make it inside and discover the place is empty — more guests on the outside than the in.
That, roughly speaking, has been the marketing strategy for most new social media services that have launched. Remember the audio app Clubhouse? That’s exactly what they did. And now it’s happening again: over a million eager users queuing for access to Bluesky, the new Twitter challenger.
In the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, a slew of alternatives to the text-based social network appeared. The technically complex Mastodon, Donald Trump’s Truth Social, and Bluesky — which comes from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey himself, launched during his own time as Twitter’s CEO, no less.
A charitable interpretation would see this as an attempt to correct the mistakes Dorsey made with Twitter the first time around. A more critical reading would point out that it’s precisely all the similarities to Twitter that are the problem.
Because Bluesky is — intentionally, of course — very similar to Twitter. It says “reposted” instead of “retweeted,” but an untrained eye would barely be able to tell the two services apart.
Those similarities also mean that the same types of challenges are likely to arise.
The spread of misinformation, harassment, and automated bots have been difficult problems for Twitter to solve for over a decade. Even knowing in advance that these issues will emerge, there are no obvious solutions to them.
Like Clubhouse — which rose like the sun and set like a stone — Bluesky will likely struggle to maintain the atmosphere that exists with around 50,000 users once that number grows tenfold or a hundredfold.
A large part of the challenge in the social media category lies precisely in scale.
Imagine hosting a dinner party for a handful of guests. It’s pleasant but fairly predictable. You know who’s coming and you know, more or less, how they’ll behave. Now compare that to running a restaurant with 300 covers. You can prepare, of course, but things will happen that you didn’t anticipate.
That’s why it’s misleading to look at the temporary success of small social media challengers. Succeeding in the genre with a small number of users is an entirely different kind of challenge.
Scale also attracts actors with intentions other than making new friends or posting cat videos. The state-sponsored disinformation campaigns that have made headlines arise wherever there are large numbers of people to influence.
Is there nothing genuinely new about these challengers? Bluesky and the similar Mastodon both emphasize one aspect that differs from Twitter: control over the platform and ownership of your own content.
Bluesky is decentralized, meaning each user can take their content with them and switch to a different provider. This sidesteps the monolithic — and, since Musk took over, constantly shifting — rulebook that Twitter operates under. If the rules don’t suit you, you can move elsewhere, or start your own version.
Here, however, we encounter another truth about social networks. Users choose the path of least resistance. You can configure extremely specific settings on Facebook that control exactly which friends see which content. But how many people actually do that?
Being able to float freely in a decentralized world is theoretically possible — but the vast majority of users will never even understand why they might want to.
Bluesky does one thing very well. Like the nightclub with the long queue, it creates a feeling of wanting to belong. The demand is so intense that invitations are being sold on eBay. But once you’re inside, you’ll likely discover what always turns out to be true: it looked better from the outside than it actually is.
