- There are highly visible people on there who are taking public pedagogy extremely seriously. For example there is a drive to establish the expectation of alt text enforced by a norm of not resharing posts with images which lack it. I think this is an excellent thing but I do wonder how it will shift as the network grows.
- There’s also a self-congratulatory feel to the developing user cultures, with the convention of referring to ‘the other site’ and self-definition as Bluesky early adopters. This could easily come across as an embrace of exclusivity which might cause problems as the network grows, particularly if the public pedagogy is experienced by some as overly directive.
- The network is growing in a slow and purposeful way through the invite code system. Each user gets one invite code each week and this naturally lends itself to deciding who to share this with. This leads existing networks to reconstruct themselves based on stronger ties (i.e. I care enough to share a code with you) than were the norm with Twitter. The further element of self-selection involved in being interested enough to join is leading to distinctive networks effects.
- The relatively shallow network means that the instrumental possibilities for academics are relatively limited. It will take time and energy to build a following which still be more effectively deployed on existing platforms. This goes some way to giving Bluesky a lovely feel at the moment but it might be a check on the growth, given the competitive individualism which academics often bring to social media.
- It’s currently in Beta with intense restrictions on growth and no adverts. I realise Bluesky is a public benefit corporation but OpenAI was partly a non-profit and look how that turned out. My concern is that we might be placing our trust in a platform which could develop in a similar way to pre-Musk Twitter and this misses an opportunity to do things differently. From looking aroudn the Bluesky staff accounts it’s clearly a mission driven organisation so I hope I’m being overly cynical. But I can’t shake the feeling we might be entering into a dynamic of digital migrations of academics responding to waves of enshittification which make a whole sequence of platforms unusable.
Raiding the inarticulate since 2010
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Mark Carrigan 