Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky Is Trying to Save the Internet. It Wants Your Feedback, Please.

Instead, Dorsey said decisions around content moderation should be made by the users. It’s the users who should control the algorithms, not companies, and only a user should be able to delete their posts or shutter their account, with few exceptions. Dorsey’s post was a manifesto, a look back at what went wrong and a utopian vision for the future, for Bluesky.

Elon Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” shut down the Revue platform, where Dorsey had published his musings, immediately after Dorsey’s post. The content is preserved by the Internet Archive.

A Blueskied vision of the future

Bluesky is an attempt to build out Dorsey’s dream, but it’s not the only Twitter alternative. It’s not even Dorsey’s favorite. In the early days of Musk’s Twitter, some users flocked to Mastodon, a tediously complicated social media platform that’s also designed so users control the service. Meta’s working on its own Twitter competitor, and Dorsey tends to hang out more often on Nostr, another Twitteresque social site that also has his financial support. Dorsey posts on Nostr about 60 times a day.

But for now, Bluesky is the most promising option, and easily the sexiest when it comes to internet clout. Custom algorithms aren’t available yet, but the app offers some impressive innovations.

The exhausting debate over verification and Elon’s Blue Checks will never happen on Bluesky. If you want, you can add a line of code to your website to make your Bluesky username a URL (i.e. Gizmodo’s handle is @gizmodo.com). That way, there’s no need for Bluesky to decide you’re important enough to verify because you verify yourself, and it’s impossible without access to your web domain. With a little extra code, an organization can also verify its employees in the same way. The dumbest thing I will ever be proud of is the fact that I was the first journalist to get “verified” on Bluesky with the username @thomas.gizmodo.com.

One of the other big differentiators is the fact that Bluesky is building a decentralized protocol, which is word soup that you might remember from the days when your most annoying cousin made and lost a fortune on Bitcoin. That basically means Bluesky is making its code public and allowing anybody to build outside tools and services that integrate with the platform. That is pretty neat. It means you can keep your Bluesky username and all your followers and friends when you jump to another social media service that uses Bluseky’s code. It also means you can build your own social media service with it, if you’re a huge dork.

That solves one of the problems of the reigning social media champs: even if you absolutely hate Instagram or Twitter, it’s hard to quit because they’ve got your network locked down. Bluesky offers a new flavor of online freedom.

And as Bluesky’s privileged users wait for the custom algos, they’ve already got some tools to fine tune the experience. Bluesky has controls for content including porn, other kinds of nudity, violence, hate speech, spam, and even people impersonating other accounts. It’s up to you whether you want to see this material, or if you want it hidden behind a warning or blocked all together. That’s more agency than you get on the majority of social media sites.

Over on the live stream, Frazee worked through the custom feeds, carefully considering decisions, like where buttons should go, all the while asking users what they thought would work best. Right now, everyone seems to like him and his coworkers, but if their plan works, Bluesky will grow into a behemoth, and with power comes vitriol. People loved Facebook once, too.

You can’t ask Mark Zuckerberg what that’s like, but Frazee is right there. I dropped in on the chat to ask him if he thinks giving users more control will help stave off the haters.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” Frazee said, laughing as he read the question out loud. “Eventually people will have complaints, I’m sure. I hope that people don’t end up hating us, but if they do, if they do we’ll try to make sure we help out as many people as possible. And I’m emotionally prepared for that. You can’t please everybody,”

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