Bluesky is opened

X is torn and ingrown

X explodes with rage.

It has been here for some time that the leaders of Twitter were going to sell. The problem that they had was that it took to much money to run the site and they could not find enough revenue to sustain it. But what they did have was the entire network of promoters who would use Twitter as one of the core sites. In other words, they had something to sell, the value was going up slowly, and be burn rate was too high.

At this point, Elon Musk stepped up and began to acquire chunks of Twitter. at this point, the game was up but many people on the site did not realize what was going to happen when Elon Musk was quite ready to take it over. Then when he did he did exactly what he needed to do: he fired almost all of the software developers and squeezed for as much money as could. Finally, the end came today when he sued the company, which was basically the only way he could get the last dregs of capital from it. this was because for Musk it was a temporary need, and once that need was expended he had no reason to keep it around. One may still come to him so he will not cashier it entirely.

But once the president was elected there was a very different reasoning involved in its users. The tone of X, though I admit that for me the capital letter “X” will be forever associated with the windowing system from MIT, was of “owning the libs.” with the collection of Donald Trump to his second term the great diaspora of chatting sites was opened up for business.

The original front-runner was Threads, but rapidly a new contender has opened up and that is Bluesky. These are different from Substack, which while it has communication the largest point is to store large chunks such as novels or short stories. that is why it is here on Substack that this essay is produced: Bluesky and Threads have no feature for the long piece.

So why Bluesky? The first test is whether its design was good, and it passed that with flying colors because it was like the Twitter of 10 years ago: it made it possible to cleanly type and place articles. It is being noted. And noted.

But the next real test was if it got influencers of a variety of levels to come and make Bluesky a point of presence. this for me was what made me join because many of the old bloggers made their presence known: Emptywheel , Matthew Yglesias, Atrios, and Taegan Goddard were the ones whose work I knew, but there were thousands who joined because of the influencers of their world. and the influencers from other platforms such as YouTube made their presence known.

Then came the legacy media: CNN, The Economist, The New York Times, the BBC, The New Stateman, The Atlantic, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the Independent, the London Times, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, and Le Monde - among many many others. In short, there is the ability to follow the news as it happens and discuss with one’s own travelers on whatever road to seek.

And that meant that the politicians and other newsmakers came as well: Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania has made his presence known, and some who are as yet been active for example, Andy Beshear, and of course the Senators are interested in whether this platform will produce results including Senator Ron Wyden, Senator Tina Smith, Senator Mark Warner, and John Fetterman. And these are just the politicians. But interests are not always so general, for example, Irish Literary Times is an example of a smaller group.

This has led to people whose primary goal is to find people of a particular interest and bring them to a wider audience. For example, there is one thread that is devoted to readers of general fiction. There are Youtube explainers. One thing is one of the origins of the name is Blue Sky in Chinese: 蓝天 or Lántiān.

This means that this is not some “echo chamber” but a different take on short text communication that is different in its approach. “X” has become mean and rewards people who last their opinion, so long as it is a right-wing opinion, in your face. For those people who are not into this the notion that blocking rather than engaging has become present in Bluesky. Intent of this form is to create the world of about 10 years ago where there is discussion and pressing for news from other sources.

This means that Bluesky is at the next level: Can they handle success?

The growth of Bluesky has meant that within the last 24 hours, there were more people there than on Threads. Some of the traffic is there for the platform but there has also been traffic that wants to entice the user to make money in BitCoin, or in the old-fashioned way of sex. But this is relatively minor in terms of the total output. it also begs the question whether all this traffic is legitimate, but even if it is not the platform has reached the stage of being one of the main platforms for its particular niche: it is the advertisement, whereas the sites that link to it are for the content.