Bluesky feels like Twitter did in the glory days

Hey, everybody. I've decided to delete all my Twitter posts, lock down my Twitter account and leave the platform. I'm going all in on Blue Sky, which, in the last month for sure has become way more fun for me, than X has been for the last couple years. And I wrote a blog post about it that actually well, it generated quite a bit of attention, I'd say. Mostly positive, but more hate mail than I've had in a little while.

And I thought I'd just, go through this blog post so y'all can hear it. I've been on Twitter since 2008. And since then I gained something like 40,000 followers. I think I've posted over 50,000 times and built really countless relationships. It Twitter was my favorite place on the Internet.

It felt like the place where everybody from my circle, bootstrappers, creators, tech people, devs was hanging out. It was like our water cooler. And it's funny, everyone kind of puts the glory days of Twitter, in a different kind of a, date range. I think it was 2 1010 to 2014 maybe, or 2010 to 2018 where it was really great. And when Elon took over, I was worried and I wrote about it quite a bit.

And some people were annoyed that I kept writing about it, but I was worried that his leadership would ruin it. And now November 2024, it feels like the verdict is in. The experience has just gotten way worse, at least for me. What does worse look like? Well, really terrible ads, including some really questionable, I'd say adult content ads, violent and extreme content in the for you feed.

And for some reason, I just can't get off the for you feed. Like I'll, I'll change it and it keeps switching back. I think also just the, amount of Elon you get in your feed, no matter what has been, not great. And then posts with links. If you tweet a link, which used to be the best part of Twitter, those posts don't do very well.

Links are actively suppressed on the platform, which I think is a bummer because that used to be the funnest part about Twitter is that everyone was writing these great blog posts, sharing them on Twitter. And then you could use a tool like Nuzzle to, at the end of the day to get kind of the best links. Like what was everybody sharing, reading, and resharing on Twitter? Well, that experience is done. Now everybody does these silly links and threads and clicks to those articles have gone way down.

Just not as good of an experience. Lots of spam, spam everywhere, bots everywhere, spam in my DMs. X has also just announced that they're training their AI on all of our public posts, which I don't know how to feel about that. Agrok, if you've tried it, is problematic as an AI. The guardrails are just off.

And I I'm not completely opposed to some of my content being used to train AIs, but not under Elon's leadership. I think he's just been really irresponsible. And I don't really wanna support the AI work that he's doing. I think, I think it's just problematic. What else?

Dropping free API support. That's been huge. There used to be this ecosystem of amazing apps built on top of, the Twitter API and all of that went away, especially when Elon made it prohibitively expensive to use those APIs. And then eventually prohibiting third party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific, which were these amazing little indie businesses built on top of the platform. And then there's just charging for DMs verification, everything.

So for me, Twitter has degraded significantly over the past few years. And that's why Blue Sky's recent momentum in the last month, really since the beginning of November has been such a breath of fresh air. Blue sky is really having its moment. There's real momentum over on that platform. Lots of indie hackers, bootstrappers, and Laravel folks have made the switch.

And, you know, if you haven't tried it in a while, I I think you gotta try it again. When I tried it a year ago, it felt not very active and also kind of, lots of like kinda furry posts and weird kind of fringe content, which I'm not opposed to, but it wasn't, you know, really my thing. I wanted to hang out with other bootstrappers and indie hackers and people making stuff. But today there's a big community of those people that are over on Blue Sky. It's really felt alive.

And if you can see all the charts with, Blue Sky lately, it's been number 1 app in the app store. It's the number of people posting has increased dramatically in the last month. And I know what you're thinking. You know, if you're thinking I don't have time or energy for another social network, I get it. You know, over the past year, I've tried other Twitter alternatives like Mastodon and threads, but neither gave me that kind of nostalgic Twitter feeling of, yeah, this is the place where the the watering hole where we're all like hanging out and sharing stuff.

But blue sky is that place now. Interactions feel genuine, fun, less performative. It kinda reminds me of how Twitter felt in the glory days before the algorithms rewarded all that engagement farming. And I think a lot of that engagement farming happened once there was the creator partner program and people just started to kind of game the for you tab, for outrage and just baiting people into interacting with them. And then they would get, you know, all of this creator money.

And those posts, like any post that's designed for engagement just seems either way too extreme and just designed to push your buttons or on the other side, very banal and not interesting, like this kind of like psychobabble drivel. You know, these kind of pop culture aphorisms that people seem to like for some reason. And it would just they, you know, those posts would do really well. But for me on the platform, it's just like, no one's hanging out here. It's just all this performative posting.

And, yeah. Blue Sky just feels like a breath of fresh air. I love this quote from Josh Wood over at Honey Badger. They did a great episode on Founder Quest about Blue Sky. I highly recommend you listen to it.

He said, it's weird being on a social media platform where people are actually just posting about the things they like and having fun and making jokes. That's what I've been appreciating about it. Here's kind of a bunch of reasons I think Blue Sky is worth switching to. Number 1, it feels alive and fun again. It's just like I said, people hanging out, sharing cool stuff.

Number 2, the interactions are better. I don't know about you, but engagement on Twitter has kinda gone downhill. Like, you post something and maybe get somebody to reply. And I think one thing that's exciting people about Blue Sky is there's so much early adopter energy there. That just means it's a bunch of enthusiastic people who really want to interact and have meaningful conversations are on the platform right now.

They're the ones who have joined. Practically, what that means is a lot of people are joining Blue Sky and finding that they can get into conversations right away and that people are actually, you know, replying and, there's actual conversation there. Number 3, no algorithm to please. You can post links without them being suppressed. You can be weird and real.

There's no pressure to perform for the algorithm. Number 4, better experience, less cruft. There's no awful ads shoved in your face. There's no what's trending in your sidebar. Now, actually, whenever I log back into Twitter to check on, I'm checking on all my tweets being deleted.

They have to kind of batch them every day. And I'll log into Twitter and it's just like, man, there's all this garbage on the screen that I don't wanna see. And blue sky has that beautiful simple UI that you'll remember from early Twitter. And number 5, developer friendly. What made early Twitter so fun in the early days was people building cool stuff on top of it.

And that's what's happening right now. People are building all sorts of apps on top, like analytics and posting things, and then just weird. I I'll, I'll put some of them in the show notes, but it's fun. It feels fun again. People building stuff on top of this open protocol.

And, you know, because of all those things I listed, blue sky is growing like crazy. Like they've been adding a 1000000 users a day. And a lot of this is because of this feature called starter packs. That's super smart. It allows people to cultivate, like here's a bunch of amazing indie founders and makers and bootstrappers.

I've got a list. I'll put it in the show notes. You click the link, you sign up for blue sky, and then you can just follow all those people. So you don't have to rebuild your following graph from other networks. People are crafting these starter packs that allow you to quickly find people that are interesting in different topics.

And I think I should also mention, you know, if you're looking to build an audience right now, blue sky has the momentum. Because of all that growth and these starter packs, active users on blue sky are gaining a ton of followers right now. In the past month, I went from just over 2,000 followers to about 6,000 followers. And so in a matter of weeks, I'm like on my way to matching the number of followers I had on Twitter on Blue Sky. And it took me I don't it took me a decade to get to 40,000 followers on Twitter.

It's just clear that people on Blue Sky are hungry for something different. They're actively seeking out genuine interactions, And that's why engagement is so high. Instead of people mindlessly scrolling through a rage inducing for you feed, folks are actively looking for interesting people to follow. And if you're active on the platform, you can take advantage of that. If you're going to get started on Blue Sky, I would sign up for an account.

Don't look at the homepage. The homepage is turning a lot of people off because it's just this, I think just the general fire hose of all of the posts on the platform. And so there's some political stuff on there. There's and I can tell you that my feed doesn't look like any of that. In fact, all of these complaints that blue sky is a bubble and that blue sky is like over moderating and all this stuff, I have not experienced that at all.

To me, it's actually just feels like early Twitter. And so if you sign up for an account, even better sign up for an account through a starter pack and then fill out your profile, add a link to your project or website or company, post a few welcome messages, and just start interacting. I've also got some resources in the show notes for migrating from Twitter to Blue Sky. There's lots of great information out there. I I really feel like who knows what's gonna happen in the future.

Like, maybe this is just a moment, you know, Blue Sky's gonna have to make money eventually. They do have funding. But the CEO, is this incredible person, Jay Graber. And by every account, she seems principled, fair, and committed to the open web. She's got this great team.

It's about 20 people and they're just executing really well. They've added features like custom feeds, advanced moderation tools. They're doing it right. And I just wanna enjoy this moment as long as it lasts. I'm hoping it lasts for a long time, but if it doesn't, I'm still there just enjoying this moment of being on this platform that's different than Twitter ever was because it's built on this open protocol.

So even if Blue Sky goes away, this AT protocol will continue. And theoretically, all of our content and following graphs are all portable and we'll be able to take them and even host them ourselves. So, yeah, if you haven't already, give it a try and let me know if you do. Right now, I'm m I Justin over there. Am I Justin?

I haven't connected my custom domain yet because you have to give up your old handle when you do that. But once that's fixed, I'll probably connect my custom domain so that I could be at justinjackson.ca. So, yeah, go give it a try. And if you're on there, say hi.