“Don’t forget to turn ‘Nazis’ off in your preferences!” a friend told me when I asked for advice about Bluesky Social, the latest fad in Twitter clones. She was referring to its series of toggles for personalized moderation. You can “hide,” “warn” about, or “show” various categories of posts, like “Spam,” three different classes of sexual imagery, and, as my friend alluded to, “Hate Groups.” It’s the first sign that this is not old-fashioned, pre-Musk Twitter. Whether that’s good or bad depends on what you valued most about that era. Don’t tell that to some of the site’s biggest boosters, however.
“[J]ack selling twitter for $44b and then starting the same website and poaching all its users is so fucking funny to me like literally lmao,” reads a representative tweet on the matter. And it is indeed funny. Except it’s not the same website. Its decentralized design as a “protocol” rather than a “platform” has much more in common with Mastodon, which briefly absorbed a Twitter exodus before becoming an object of derision for what many saw as its excessive complexity and stuffy culture.
For the moment, Bluesky is easier to use, and its median culture is infinitely more freewheeling, at least on the surface. In a major coup, it attracted veteran posters like US representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and the civic god of Twitter known as dril, as well as a gaggle of shitposters. But while that has set a tone for the site that feels liberating and free of the prejudice Elon Musk has unleashed, it is far from clear that this platform will become the next Twitter; if the developers have their way, it won’t.
To get to the heart of the problem, we have to talk about why so many journalists are excited about the shitposter migration, starting with what shitposting actually is. It’s a classic I-know-it-when-I-see-it phenomenon, but in brief it can be defined as satirical content that is of "aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality." Though Merriam-Webster puts the term’s origins in the early 90’s, it was popularized in its current form by 4chan in the aughts and has since come to be a catchall term for posts that evince a kind of Dadaist refusal to take an unserious world seriously. At least, at its best. It can also just describe a lot of casual bigotry, mocking harassment, or ceaseless ironizing that foments cynical complacency. But commentators are not wrong to suggest that the presence of such posters is part of a vibrant (if not necessarily healthy) ecosystem on a large, centralized platform.
Not everyone is happy about the shitposter influx. Conservative commentator David Frum lamented that he only wanted to meet “smart/interesting/amusing” people and did not want “weirdos” and “psychopaths” popping up on his feed, referring to the shitposters being praised in a TechCrunch article he was quote-tweeting.
NBC tech journalist Ben Collins replied: “You do want weirdos. They’re the line of defense against the people who ruin everything. It’s why the big places—like TikTok and YouTube and Reddit and here previously—worked. They’re an enforcement mechanism that allows for better conversations and shoos away hate.”
This brings me back to Bluesky’s aspirations. The moderation toggles are just the start. A key goal of Bluesky Social is that it be decentralized—people linked across independently owned servers that use the AT Protocol protocol, with the Bluesky UI/UX overlaying it all. Crucially, users and servers will be able to label posts or specific users—e.g., with a tag like “racist”—and anyone can subscribe to that list of labels, blocking posts on that basis. Bluesky calls this “composable moderation.”