Last week, a joke familiar from X circulated on rival platform Bluesky: “(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??” It was obviously a jab at the moral intensity that now seems to define the site, and indeed much of the rest of the social media landscape. On most platforms such a joke might go viral for a day then fade. On Bluesky, it metastasised into something resembling a crisis.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber reposted the joke with a comment: “Too real. We’re going to try to fix this. Social media doesn’t have to be this way.” When a user shot back by calling for gender-critical journalist and researcher Jesse Singal to be banned from the platform, Graber responded playfully: “WAFFLES.” The word immediately became a meme, invoked as shorthand for everything that feels absurd about Bluesky’s internal politics, and revealed a divide over free speech and censorship that is roiling the platform.

“Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked,” Graber argued. “And harassing people in general has never changed their mind.” On a different platform, this might have been received positively, yet almost since its inception as an independent company in 2021 (having previously been affiliated with Twitter) Bluesky has provided a more hostile environment for defences of free speech. The site’s early adopters imagined it as a sanctuary for Left-leaning netizens, especially trans users who fled X after Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022.

Graber has always insisted her aim is a decentralised protocol, not a single moral community. However, reconciling that vision with the reason so many of Bluesky’s users are there in the first place is hard. One side frames moderation as solidarity; the other rejects moral authority. You can’t appeal to progressives, specifically, and have both.

The underlying question is worth asking, despite the sensitivity of Bluesky’s user base. What kind of speech should a social network tolerate, and who should decide? That tension stretches back to the dawn of the virtual community. In the Eighties and Nineties, communities were experiments in free speech — but they frayed under disputes over tone, governance, and the limits of inclusion. The dream of a global public sphere often foundered on human nature. People want freedom, but also protection. “Safety” means different things to different people.

The trouble with “free speech” is that it demands tolerating statements we find distasteful, without reducing everything we dislike to “harm”. Online, that distinction collapses. Last century, sociologist Sherry Turkle observed that in digital life, identity becomes the medium of discourse, so that disagreement feels like a personal violation. Once identity becomes a lens, anything which challenges it is experienced as an attack.

Critics have argued that Bluesky lacks accountability. But that is also a design choice: an attempt to preserve pockets of autonomy not entirely governed by public feeling. The loudest users treat inclusion as eliminating harm before it occurs. But that standard is unworkable: no complex community can anticipate every form of offence. Defenders of Bluesky often invoke early Twitter as an analogue for what they want the platform to be: a small republic of ideas. But even that online era was fragile. A decentralised protocol promises freedom, yet users expect the company to enforce virtue. They want control over their feeds and protection from offensive ideas. Those demands are contradictory, as no social system can guarantee both maximal autonomy and perfect safety.

Social networks are experiments, not utopias. Freedom of expression has always required tolerance, patience, and a willingness to live with discomfort. The internet intensifies emotion, collapses nuance, and concentrates attention — which makes these virtues ever rarer.

It’s useful to consider Tumblr, which was once among the most permissive, eccentric corners of social media. The platform has survived waves of moral scrutiny, perhaps because it has maintained a degree of separation from mainstream networks and a pseudonymous culture. But its survival is hardly resounding, and it has had to compromise repeatedly. In December 2018, Tumblr imposed a blanket ban on pornography, cutting off much of its historic queer and erotic communities. That decision reportedly caused a traffic drop of around 30%. The ban reflected legal pressures — notably, Apple removed the app from its store after issues involving illicit material — and advertiser unease.

Tumblr survived not because it avoided moral scrutiny altogether, but because it could remain marginal, emotionally diffuse, and ambiguously communal. Its default chronological feed and weak algorithmic amplification also limited drama. Today, its identity is tinged by nostalgia and obsolescence: the modern “alternative” web, preserved more in longing than growth.

If Bluesky wants to scale, it cannot remain a perpetual experiment. It must choose: public square or private club. A public square tolerates cacophony; a club enforces belonging, at the cost of exclusion. At present, Bluesky hovers between the two: more ethos than community, more promise than practice. It might remain a haven for X refugees, but Graber’s vision of true success may be some way off.