I’ve Figured Out Why Bluesky Is Such a Sad Place to Hang Out

By Luke Winkie

Enter your email to receive alerts for this author.

Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences.

Unsubscribe from email alerts

Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Luke Winkie?

June 12, 20255:45 AM

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

For a different perspective on what’s going on at Bluesky, check out this conversation between my colleagues Alex Kirshner and Nitish Pahwa. 

Ever since Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion and gradually infused its brand with his grotesque visage, the prevailing thinking has been that the website’s refugees would soon need a new home. I was largely sympathetic to this cause. Like a lot of good people on this earth, I hated the idea of bolstering the stock value of a company owned by a tech baron who indulges the most psychedelic corners of MAGAdom—especially as his tics, grievances, and ketamine-addled hyperfixations were mechanized into the infrastructure of what became known as X. In an effort to own the libs, Musk hatcheted his platform into incompetence. Today X exclusively surfaces the most upsetting content conceivable in our timelines; its gouging monetization program encourages incessant spam from brain-dead engagement farmers; its doofus A.I. model lectures the public about imaginary white genocide; its emboldened Nazi community edits together Day-Glo fan cams of Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Hitler. Oh, and if you’re not paying the $8 a month for a premium subscription, nobody else on the site can see your posts.

All of this is to say that X isn’t a very nice place to hang out on the internet anymore. It was inevitable that the liberal mainstream—exiled into the wilderness—would try to regroup with a version of the Twitter they knew and loved. Done correctly, this place could overcome Musk’s terrible vision in a far more hygienic environment and, if nurtured properly, could be the opening of a new front in the culture war—something to rival the vise grip Republican-aligned media has on digital airwaves.

Unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the social media service liberals came up with was even worse. Yes, I’m talking about Bluesky. The name evokes a spiritual purification, a much-needed reset of cultural norms after Armageddon. Naturally, Bluesky was founded by Jack Dorsey, the man who very recently was the CEO of Twitter, and he imbued his new project with the same texture as its mother site. (Posts are limited to 300 characters, while an algorithm sorts an infinite tide of new missives at the top of the screen. Unlike today’s X, Bluesky is basically readable, devoid of the random ads and mind-breaking A.I. slop that have made unbearable so much of the experience of being on our phones.) The design is deliberately minimalist, in a way that gestures toward the original dream of social media: a global salon adjusted to our tightly held proclivities in which we aren’t constantly confronted with conflict, anxiety, and catastrophe. That premise sounded pretty intriguing—I eagerly signed up for Bluesky when it launched in 2023, because I have long lusted for a population-wide Men in Black–style memory wipe that could send us back to the salad days of social media, when every other tweet was about the sandwich somebody was currently eating.

Unfortunately, if Bluesky has proved anything, it’s that peace can no longer exist on the internet. There is no way to go back to a time before “social media norms,” no way to preclude how we have all learned to interact online. The platform—maybe any platform—is incapable of transporting its users to the blissful dawn of Twitter; the best Bluesky can replicate is a hellish, inescapable, never-ending version of 2016.

I do not want to be unfair to the many people horrified about the second Trump administration. There are lots of indignities to be angry about, and more of them mount every day. That said, I would hope that one of the major lessons rank-and-file liberals internalized after two defeats at the hands of the Republicans is that there is a certain school of internet posting that is perceived—by a growing majority—to be laughably ineffective in stemming the globe’s authoritarian drift and, worse than that, extremely annoying. I’ve struggled for years to articulate the distinct contours of the structure, but, thankfully, Bluesky endlessly blooms with perfect examples. Here is one, from a 444,000-follower-strong account belonging to “Anonymous.” It is a crudely A.I.–generated mockup of Trump bowing at the feet of Vladimir Putin, solemnly captioned “Reality.” Here is another, from Harry Dunn, who has 256,000 followers on the platform and hosts a podcast called Cleanup on Aisle 45. “Donald Trump is an orange idiot,” he writes. “Anyone who votes for his tax bill is an oranger idiot.” (The post has accrued more than 800 likes.)

The elements of cringe are on full display. The coin of the realm is a reliance on hacky material well past its shelf life (we’re on Year 9 of orange jokes), alloyed with a dour sense of ceremony—as if the poster itself is the only one to register the gravity of this historical moment and is demonstrating that somberness through the trillionth permutation of a Trump–Putin meme. Given the platform’s ostensible opposition to X’s thriving far right, it isn’t shocking—or even a problem!—that Bluesky has taken on an outwardly liberal character. The issue, rather, is that the people who have orbited to the top of its algorithm are the exact same group of clout-hungry #Resistance characters who first made a name for themselves on Twitter during those confused early years of the MAGA insurgency. Remember George Conway, alumnus of the hilarious-in-retrospect Lincoln Project? He’s back, repeating the exact same “But Her Emails” jokes he was making in 2017. Seth Abramson, chief promulgator of the wildly overheated Russia collusion scandal, has also taken his talents to Bluesky. Recently, he has been defending Joe Biden against charges regarding his highly visible cognitive decline. And Anthony Scaramucci, the Trump comms director who notoriously lasted exactly 10 days before getting axed? You’d better believe he’s on Bluesky, fantasizing about Trump’s third impeachment.

The total absence of contrasting voices on Bluesky is certainly a balm for the massive swath of Americans who need to be reminded that 75 million citizens did indeed vote for Kamala Harris. But the platform really fronts the reality that Democrats are stuck in the past—unable, still, to process the grievous psychic injury left behind by the MAGA realignment that occurred nearly a decade ago. Scrolling through these posts, you begin to get the sense that the #Resistance has had its spirit beaten out of it. There was a time in living memory when Democrats genuinely seemed to believe that Donald Trump could be conquered by a collective mass of angry tweets—a defiance composed of covfefe and Drumpf and the emoluments clause, maybe with the occasional tribute to erstwhile special counsel Robert Mueller. With that premise proved spectacularly false, all that’s left is this graying generation of liberal influencers, propping up a fun house–mirror incarnation of the former Twitter, like a nostalgia tour for curdled boomers.

Frankly, this isn’t all Bluesky’s fault. At the end of the day, a platform is a receptacle for posts; it is up to us what we do with it. And in 2025, the only way anyone knows how to interface with social media is to try and leverage it for fame. The version of the internet I loved, the one where we could talk about sandwiches, is irretrievable. Scaramucci and Conway will continue to aim for the cheap seats, and they will be rewarded with oodles of likes and reposts lighting up their dopamine synapses and inspiring hangers-on to chase the same hit. Sure, there are some great posters on the platform fighting the good fight, but Bluesky’s preservation of Obama-era liberalism has brought with it some of the coalition’s most unsavory tendencies: the exasperating pedantry, the god-awful reaction GIFs, the ridiculous instinct to audit the ideological purity of every one of its users. Earlier this week, the pseudonymous shitposter @dril—responsible for some of the most canonical tweets of all time—showcased the baffled, scolding responses that billow up in his replies whenever he makes one of his characteristically hallucinogenic jokes on Bluesky. All humor is reflexively punished. @Dril described the experience thusly: “Blue sky is supreme because every time you post you get 100 school principals in the replies asking to see you in their office.”

The Democratic Party is committing huge tranches of cash to consulting firms and media brands in search of a definitive rebrand. (You’re seeing some evidence of that already, with the party’s largely successful pivot to shitposting on X.) How can the Democrats become cool? How do they shed their hall monitor reputation? Does the party have the means to ferment a counterculture that is agile, tech-savvy, and fashionable? A movement you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be a part of? The sooner they find an answer to that question, the better. Because Bluesky has crystallized the Democrats as they are currently perceived. And no one wants to hang out with them.