EDITED: There are portions of this original issue that are not up to the standard of what I believe. I was thoughtless and I apologize for it. The piece has been edited to more clearly illustrate what I believe without using crass comparisons or lazy generalizations, no matter how well-intentioned I believed them to be when I wrote them originally. I am truly sorry to those I've hurt.
I am not entirely sure Bluesky was supposed to be the marginalized person’s answer to Gab or TruthSocial from the start. While he was not involved in the actual development of the platform, Jack Dorsey’s money funded the project. While the pall Elon Musk casts over Twitter now is ghastly and monumental, it should not whitewash the fact that Dorsey’s libertarian reptile brain did not allow him to deal effectively with the nascent neo-Nazi movement that Steve Bannon and Donald Trump allowed to come to light. Do you think Dorsey, a guy who when told there were Nazis on his site, waited until the last possible straw was broken to ban them, would select people who would challenge him morally and intellectually, or would he pick other people who treated free speech like an utter perversion to be trivialized, tokenized, and sexualized to the point where the only speakers whose ideas were featured were those speaking from the abyssal lurches of the right wing. Echo chambers are bad unless the echoes tell you that you, with your money and white skin and the penis you were born with that you want, are the real victim here.
Bluesky became a haven for the marginalized because the people who started filtering into the site through their invite-only policy were the most online posters ever, all of whom categorically leaned to the left. The ur-shitposters who arrived that made their names on Twitter, like dril (who’s only posted twice, to be fair) and Chinchillazilla (the Kentuckian who somehow found herself at the center of discourse for the crime of cooking chili for her neighbors) opened the ranks for others to come through, many of whom were Black, trans/queer, or in sex work, all trying to find a place to be social without having to fear for their lives and safety. In turn, the dynamic of the entire app went from the first users being crypto/AI/blockchain assholes posting about their NFTs or whatever to being this haven for all the people the Nazis and Republicans and the alt-right “just asking questions” crowd chased from other platforms.
Chasing the marginalized groups out of “elite” spaces, no matter how egalitarian they’re pitched1, has been the MO of people with resources ever since resource aggregation was invented sometime at the dawn of history. The places to be, the scenes, they all come where the marginalized groups, the one who know how to live like there’s no tomorrow because for them there may not fucking be a tomorrow, gather.
The next step after a scene is established is for vultures in capital to cannibalize it, monetize it, and then push the progenitors out as the unwanted outsiders. This happens everywhere a scene of “cool” people gathers, because the cool people have to be so to keep the presence of the heat away from them. They create something that resonates, and the power swoops in, steals it from them, and pushes them out.
Again, it’s worth noting Bluesky didn’t want the cool kids to come to the app in the first place. They just kinda did, and soon, the app was overrun with this wave of misfits and weirdos whom Twitter ostracized by courting the absolute worst scum on earth to be power users. I use the term “misfits and weirdos” in the lovingest way possible mainly because I am about as misfit and weirdo as you can get for being a cishet white dude. The app was hoppin’, for lack of a better term.
Black users started noticing patterns from the original posting corps that the devs woefully undermoderated. Those users started leaving, and the ones that stayed were not quiet about it, nor should they have been. The proverbial levee broke when a user with the name “N*****s” was discovered, and furthermore, the account was allowed to exist for sixteen days before anyone caught wind of it. Instead of offering any substantive reason why the code from the start didn’t disallow those kinds of names, the devs made half-assed fixes to the code, lethargically pimped a new code of conduct, and then acted like nothing was wrong. The damage was done, even if things have kinda returned to a new normal, one a little more subdued than it was before the devs showed their libertarian colors.
The thing about free speech perverts is that they always seem to want to break the “echo chambers” of marginalized people. Those who’ve been terrorized for millennia just have to hear Ben Shapiro or Joe Rogan tell them why they’re worthless pieces of slime, but somehow, no one calls for Gab or Truth Social to have Marxists come on board and break their monotony of racism and xenophobia.
That’s because for as much as right libertarians love to espouse freedom and all the courage that it takes to defend it, they are scared little rats who want to be able to say whatever hateful thing is on their mind in service of getting them more money via a market they incorrectly call “free” without any pushback whatsoever. A forum they made for themselves was never going to be inclusive to the cool kids because they see the cool kids only as commodities to be stripmined and tossed out.
Libertarians control the tech spaces, especially in creation of social media sites where they think free speech means letting Nazis say what they want until they threaten to kill someone. Note, they always threaten to kill someone. So as it is in real life, the marginalized groups wander from place to place, looking for a home. There’s a reason why the Jewish diaspora landed in so many places after they were flushed out of their ancestral home. Trans people today go from town to town if they can afford it, looking for safe haven, a place either among sympathetic souls, or more likely, other trans people where there’s safety in numbers. But the life on the run can be lonely, and transience gets tiring after awhile.
Online spaces are no different because people just want places to settle down. In a world of consolidation and downsizing, niche spaces are swept out for large-swath social media megaliths. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were in place, but then Mastodon came through with incredible staying power, and then Mark Zuckerberg decided he’d try to stab at Twitter while Elon Musk had it at its most vulnerable with Threads. A place like Bluesky would be a welcome haven for the marginalized, a place where they could put down roots and not have to worry about Chaya Raichik posting their home address for existing or some fucking brand ganking their posting style to sell a pizza.
I have privilege, sure, but I don’t wanna be in any online space that’s full of hate or fakeness. I’m only still on Twitter because I have too many friends there. You’ll catch me with an Emmitt Smith jersey on screaming HOW BOUT THEM COWBOYS?!! before I register an account with Threads. I like being in a vibant, funny community, but more than that, I like seeing people be able to spread their wings, especially when they can’t in a place that criminalizes their existence.
Bluesky may not have been created for the marginalized, the Black and Jewish people, the gay and trans, the OnlyFans models and Grindr refugees. It sure as fuck belongs to them now, and if it’s taken away from them, I’m not sure what else can be done short of, well, things I shouldn’t mention in a newsletter that can get them a space where they don’t have to wander anymore.
Twitter is “virtual town square” people say. Ha, if the people who have the loudest voices are Ian Miles Cheong and Tim Pool and Chaya Raichik? That’s like giving all the megaphones to the most hateful and yet stupidest assholes possible. If the village idiot was also just the most hateful piece of shit you could think of.