Twitter was never the most popular social media platform, but for much of the 2010s, it punched above its weight, culturally speaking. Its impact on online culture and global politics  has been significant—across presidential campaigns and prominent social movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter, while also contributing a wealth of memes and running jokes to internet culture at large; think Dril, Horse Ebooks, and Weird Twitter in general. 

More recently, Twitter has gone through some dramatic changes. After Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took over, Musk implemented changes that many longtime users felt made their experience on the site less enjoyable. The Twitter Safety team, which handled reports from users, suffered during mass layoffs. Musk also changed the verification system, removing legacy checkmarks and prioritizing posts from those subscribed to Twitter Blue—which flooded the For You tabs and reply sections with what regular users consider lower-quality posts from Elon Musk fans. 

These changes prompted a mass—though short-lived—exodus of users to Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform that allows users to choose which “instance,” or server, to post on. Your posts are sent to a feed shared with other users on your server, but you can also follow and interact with users on different servers. This approach marks a significant departure from the centralized social media feeds we’ve become accustomed to on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. But while Mastadon saw a huge increase in signups following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter—with monthly active users increasing from around 500,000 to over 2 million in November last year—it has been hemorrhaging users ever since.

In recent weeks, a more viable candidate has emerged as a potential replacement for Twitter: Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform similar to Mastodon. Bluesky is partly financed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who sits on Bluesky’s board of directors. The platform launched in February, but didn’t explode in popularity until late April, with Twitter power users and influencers scrambling to join. The heightened demand was partly fueled by Bluesky’s exclusivity—new users can only join if they receive an invite code from an existing user. Since its launch, more than 50,000 people have joined Bluesky—some after buying invite codes on eBay—with many still desperate for a code.

While the demand for invite codes remains high, Bluesky is still very much in its beta stage. User behavior is guiding the development team’s next steps: The team only included a block feature after many new users voiced concerns to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the app. 

After joining and immediately forgetting about Mastodon in November last year, I joined Bluesky on April 28. I think it has real potential to usurp Twitter as the platform of choice for a certain species of perpetually online social media user: left-leaning Twitter users who are part of Weird Twitter and who’ve been on the platform for years and have accrued a lot of followers by being entertaining. At this point however, I still gravitate towards Twitter, largely because most of my friends haven’t been able to join Bluesky yet (as much as I’d like to, I can’t invite them—users are only given one invite code every two weeks, unless the developers gift a user with bonus codes). Bluesky’s interface is decent, and the options of a “following” feed and a “what’s hot” feed allow me to keep up with those I’m following as well as conversations taking place beyond my immediate network. The introduction of blocking gives users a crucial tool for dealing with bad actors. The migration of many popular and entertaining Twitter users means a decent subculture has already formed on the app, which is something that was missing from my Mastodon experience. 

Graber has been tracking the groups or “clusters” users find themselves being sorted into after joining Bluesky, and some of the largest clusters include English/Korean/Japanese/Persian language clusters, a Brazil supercluster, Taylor Swift fans, software engineers, artists, and the “terminally online”—those Twitter power users who flooded the app in late April. The variety of clusters, as well as the amount of overlap between them—many journalists overlap with the software engineer or terminally online clusters, for example, and the politicians who’ve joined (like AOC) tend to overlap with the journalists and terminally online clusters—bode well for Bluesky’s success. The groups that were long fixtures on Twitter will likely replicate that unique Twitter culture on Bluesky.

The real moment of truth will come when Bluesky opens up to the public; currently, it’s still a rather exclusive club, and finding wider appeal will be crucial to the app’s success. With Bluesky still in invite-only mode, Musk still has time to right the ship, so to speak, but whether he wants to is another matter entirely; he could be totally satisfied with continuing to prioritize and cater to Twitter Blue subscribers to the detriment of everyone else.