Like many others on the left, I felt compelled to try the social media platform Bluesky after Elon Musk destroyed the usability of Twitter. He degraded its algorithms, reinstated the accounts of previously banned white supremacists, dismantled its best tool against misinformation, and swiftly demonstrated that his rhetoric about protecting free speech was hollow. Amid the mass exodus from Musk’s platform (which he renamed X) after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, I expressed cautious optimism about Bluesky  as an alternative. The end of 2025 marked my first full year using the platform to keep up with the world.

Did it fulfill the hype? Well, Bluesky is a better user experience than  X: It is much easier to get engagement, its anti-harassment features are robust, and the ability to transport one’s account to another platform makes the prospect of starting from scratch on another site less daunting. Its author verification system makes sense, and I especially enjoy fewer neo-Nazis advocating violence responding to my posts. 

The site has value, and yet on the whole I’d describe my experience on Bluesky as disappointing. Since the site is relatively small and dominated by a handful of subcultures compared to major social media sites, it’s a petri dish for groupthink and self-defeating provincialism. It is ultimately stupefying to spend a lot of time on a social media site where the prevailing political culture is defined by an extremely narrow range of ideological viewpoints.

Time on Bluesky feel like eating the same dish for every single meal — every single day.

In expressing my optimism at what the site could be, I clearly underestimated what it meant to enter a progressive echo chamber. Bluesky’s user base not only skews left, it tilts toward a specific band of the left. It also appears to be disproportionately shaped by users who deactivated their X accounts and signed up for Bluesky to  protest against Trump’s election and Musk’s role as a major player in that election. That is to say that, in the main, the platform appears to be made up of very online people who see choosing Bluesky over X as a form of activism.

There are millions of Bluesky users, but in my attempts to track the mainstream culture of the site I’ve observed that the most prominent commentators and power users are resistance liberals, advocates of identity-related social justice, and liberal-left types who favor a bolder and more progressive Democratic Party. Meanwhile, it seems that some sectors of the socialist left, “abundance” left and foreign-affairs-focused left remain more present on X, as do many prominent hard news reporters at major mainstream news outlets. Centrists — other than some “never Trump” Republican types — appear to be rare on Bluesky, and conservatives of most any stripe are rarer still.

Play

The activist sensibility combined with the narrow ideological parameters often makes time on Bluesky feel like eating the same dish for every single meal — every single day. Links are shared the way they might be in a group chat among friends; there’s some discussion and disagreement in analysis, but there are shared assumptions and values. Overwhelmingly, posts on the site focus on Trump’s authoritarianism, the Democrats’ ineptitude in fighting him, anti-bigotry, and criticism of media outlets and personalities whom Bluesky users feel don’t grasp the stakes of it all. That’s often fine as far as it goes, but even users who want those things should acknowledge the trade-offs.

Bluesky promotes groupthink. It’s easy to feel an illusory sense of consensus when most everyone seemingly agrees on a surface level on who the villains are. But political thinking cannot be refined without intense interrogation, friction and dissent. Bluesky’s mainstream scene is cocooned, insulated against sustained confrontation from either its left or its right. That makes it fertile soil for bad ideas to spread alongside better ones, and for people to lose touch with how their ideas come across to those outside the bubble.

There is also little possibility for political persuasion on Bluesky, which has a user base that’s a fraction of the size of X’s, and has far fewer news influencers. I think many people active on social media vastly, perhaps even catastrophically, overestimate the power of online activism, but given that many in this set do believe that it matters, it’s worth asking what they are achieving. Movement building requires engaging with mass audiences, forming coalitions with adjacent movements and convincing the apathetic, the skeptical and even the hostile to consider your cause.

There is little possibility for that in an online space like Bluesky. Instead, there is a great deal of talk of what “narrative” Democrats or influential publications like The New York Times should adopt — but those ideas are all circulated among people who already agree with each other. That’s not activism; it’s venting.

A side effect of Bluesky’s monoculture is that it’s overly focused on politics and it’s not especially fun or funny; the constancy of emergency rhetoric wears one down. I don’t need a social media platform to be funny to find it valuable, but Bluesky’s inability to replicate the lightheartedness and “little bit of everything”-ness that Twitter and Facebook did in their heyday makes it less appealing to a wider audience. The combination of the smallness and seriousness of Bluesky may help explain why Bluesky usage and engagement seems to have declined significantly over the course of the year, after a surge of activity at the beginning of it.  

That Bluesky is dominated by people who share a lot of the same progressive values does not render it immune to the classic vices of all social media. People still dogpile and say cruel things to people who say something unpopular, even though the people being criticized are nearly always political allies. (A socialist writer friend told me he thinks he may have received more commands to kill himself on Bluesky than on X for taking against-the-grain positions.) Internecine fighting is endemic to the left, but there’s something tragicomic in seeing the circular firing squad play out on a site that doesn’t host much politico-intellectual diversity in the first place.

How one feels about Bluesky may come down to what one wants from social media. I hope to be able to use it to learn and debate things, and there’s limited potential for either in such cramped quarters. That’s not an argument for using X — although I have used both X and Bluesky this year — but it is an argument for seeking out diversity in social media, news sites and real-life activities to keep abreast of the world and how people are thinking. My attitude is that one should diversify information consumption in order to see the world and society more clearly. You can learn some things on Bluesky, but it’ll also cloud your vision if you’re not careful.