The state of open social networks has rapidly changed. Building social networks that can overtake big tech platforms was always an inherently political project, but recent developments in America have added a new dimension of urgency. Centrist pundits have made an effort to paint Bluesky as a leftist space. Outrage merchants on X share and amplify fabricated narratives about Bluesky users celebrating Kirk’s death, while fascist voices grow louder in their calls to shut down and prosecute all democratic and leftist spaces, which now includes Bluesky. Now, with US congressional demands for censorship and calls to remove Bluesky from app stores, the project of building alternatives to Big Tech is colliding with American authoritarianism.
Blueskyism
American political pundit Nate Silver wrote about Blueskyism early september. In the article, Silver first sets out the statistics of how user activity on Bluesky is declining (which it is). Then he follows with the statement that Blueskyism predates Bluesky, and describes Blueskyism as behaviour Silver does not approve of: criticising people on other parts of the political spectrum, valuing academic authority, and being too dissatisfied with the current state of the world.
Blogger and centrist pundit Noah Smith followed up on Silver’s writing about Blueskyism, in a blog titled ‘The Bluesky-ization of the American left’. The article is mainly about grievances that Bari Weiss got criticised too hard on Twitter in the late 2010s, and how he’s upset that Jamelle Bouie called Smith a ‘a weird antisocial loser’.
On the surface these articles are simply grievances from centrist pundits who are extremely online and are very bothered that people on Bluesky criticise them. They are trying to paint a picture of Bluesky as a network in decline. Their articles do not mention it at all, but at least Silver is explicitly aware how important Bluesky has become to the scientific community.
However, both articles serve two important purposes:
- It provides moral cover for people who might otherwise grapple with the implications of being active on X that it’s fine to do so because Bluesky is not a real alternative.
- It sets up a permission structure where Bluesky is seen as a left and democratic space. This is what makes both articles relevant. I think their arguments are petty and show that they have not grappled with the subject matter well, but that matters little: it is a major contributor to the idea that Bluesky is a ‘left’ space.
The murder of Charlie Kirk
You’re probably just as excited to read more about Kirk as I am to write about it, so I’ll immediately skip to the relevant parts:
- Bluesky became seen as a place that celebrated the death of Kirk. Most notable here is the amplification by Elon Musk of this idea. In a post with over 26 million view, Musk wrote “They are celebrating cold-blooded murder”, with a quote post of blogger Tim Urban, who said that “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination. Such unbelievably sick people.”
- In response, Slate published an article that “No, Bluesky Isn’t Celebrating the Death of Charlie Kirk”. This article, and this other one as well, described what the network is actually like, and how the posts amplified by Musk are simply lies. What makes Bluesky powerful is the open data, and feeds like the Catch Up feed show the most liked posts of the entire network of the past day. This gives a fairly objective view of the zeitgeist of the network, which indeed confirms that there were no popular posts that celebrated the death of Kirk.
- There are effectively two versions of Kirk: one as a Christian motivational speaker who said reasonable things, and one as a hate-filled speaker. The second version could not exist as it threatened the lie of Kirk as an motivational speaker with a palatable message. If your understanding of the world is so that Kirk’s own words threaten the false reality you try to shape, nuanced commentary on the death of Kirk can feel like ‘celebration’.
- These two different versions of Kirk explain why fascists like Musk were so upset about Bluesky: Bluesky is a place that allows for speech that demonstrates that the version of Kirk as a motivational speaker who said reasonable things is a lie. Fascism is about domination, and using your power to construct and enforce false realities. Open networks, like Bluesky, where people can freely contest these manufactured narratives are existential threats to the entire project of authoritarian control.
Moderation issues
Shortly after the murder of Kirk, before anything was known about the murderer, calls began to circulate on X that blamed ‘the left’, even escalating into calls for war. It seemed that within Bluesky there quickly was an awareness that the political environment has shifted, and Bluesky had to be careful.
Both Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and COO Rose Wang made statements condemning political violence. It was the first time Graber made a stement on political developments in her position as Bluesky CEO, making it clear that Graber is aware that this specific situation might have impact on Bluesky the company.
Bluesky’s Trust & Safety team chose a highly strict reading of the rules to apply to their moderation, and it seemed that they chose to err on the side of over-moderation rather than under-moderation. This lead to a number of cases where people argued that they’ve been unfairly banned because of overzealous moderation actions by Bluesky. I’m not going to legislate the individual choices, but I think perception matters as much as reality here. Whether or not Bluesky was correct in their moderation choices, the perception of a significant part of the user base has shifted to Bluesky’s moderation as being inaccurate.
The most notable example is that caused this shift in perception is that Bluesky started to ban users for 24h for saying “rest in piss” in response to the murder of Kirk. This included people like writer Nathan Grayson, who wrote for the Aftermath a detailed report on the current state of moderation on Bluesky. Grayson paints a picture of a a chaotic state of moderation at Bluesky, with inconsistent enforcement of the rules. Some posts were removed, some bait posts were not, and sometimes posts and accounts got reinstated without clear communication or explanation.
CTO Paul Frazee mentioned off-handed in a reply on a post about something else that “the rest in piss actions got reversed”. That it is the CTO, and not the CEO or the head of Trust & Safety, who publicly states that there were mistakes made in moderation, is in itself a sign of the chaotic state of moderation at Bluesky right now. That the people who where affected by this moderation decision which got reversed were not informed is another sign.
Bluesky is in a challenging position here. The political pressure to make sure that posts that break the rules are removed is extremely high. The most powerful people in the world, including Elon Musk, are actively looking for posts on Bluesky that celebrate the death of Kirk, which they will then use to lever political actions against Bluesky. The threat that Graber will be called in front of a political body in the US to explain why they did not moderate a post that breaks the Bluesky rules and is also unfavourable on towards the right-wing elite is real. In that context, it is understandable how Bluesky PBC came to over-moderate their own platform. But appeasements towards fascists never works. When Musk could not easily find a popular post on Bluesky that celebrated the death of Kirk, Musk simply decided to share a screenshot of a post with 0 likes or replies, that has all the hall-marks of being made by a fake account instead. Musk commented “Either we fight back or they will kill us”, and the post got over 10 million views. It seems like Bluesky got the worst outcome this way: Musk got his narrative about the evils of Bluesky confirmed and spread out anyway, while Bluesky also lost crucial trust from their own user base.
Political fallout
The murder of Kirk has many political implications, of which at least three are relevant to Bluesky.
- Kirk’s murder is being used as an opportunity by the US government to crack down on political opponents, which White House Chief of Staff Stephan Miller is clear about. This feeds back into the point that pundits are trying to frame Bluesky as a space for left-wing people and Democrats. The more the US government understands Bluesky as a ‘left’ space, the more likely it will be targeted as part of a crackdown on political opponents. I’m leaving analysis how likely this is to actually happen to experts on the political machinations of authoritarian regimes. For now I think it’s already noteworthy in itself that there is an explicit push to frame Bluesky as a ‘left’ place at the same time that there is a push by people affiliated and aligned with the US government to crack down on ‘left’ places.
- The conservative publication The Federalist went one step further in calling for a crack down on democratic spaces. It writes: “While Apple, Amazon, and Google removed the social media app Parler from their platforms after it was falsely said to have had a connection with the January 6 riot at the Capitol, they are silent on the fact that Discord and Bluesky are allowing the celebration and encouragement of political violence. The Big Tech oligarchs could use some encouragement, perhaps in the form of legal liability.”
The Federalist understands the infrastructure of power that is at play in our current information environment. The vast majority of people connect to the rest of the world via apps on their phone. Google and Apple have immense gatekeeper powers by controlling what apps can be installed on everyone’s phones. Bluesky and ATProto, and ActivityPub and the fediverse as well, have only very limited defense against a Google and Apple deciding that apps that connect to the open social web should not be allowed on the app stores anymore. - Congress member Clay Higgins send out a letter to the CEOs of Meta, YouTube, TikTok, X, Truth Social and Bluesky. In it, Higgins demands that the platforms are “expected to expeditiously remove all posts that have celebrated the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. Further, the authors of these posts are to be identified and banned from your platform, as well as any new pages they may create.” Higgins also points out his position on committees to compel compliance by the companies. The letter is a clear example of government censorship of legal speech. Regardless, it shows how members of the US government are thinking about Bluesky, as a place where they will try to exert control over to limit the ability of people to have free speech.
Building resilient networks
Bluesky was founded during a time period when enshittification was a good description of the dynamic of the Big Tech platforms, and how their behaviour leads to detrimental societal outcomes. I’m using enshittification as originally described by Doctorow here, when platforms exploit their oligopolistic position to engage in a predictable pattern of value extraction. This involves initially subsidising users to build market share, then degrading user experience to serve business customers, and finally squeezing all participants once network effects create lock-in.
The Big Tech platforms are bigger and more powerful than ever, but the ecosystem in which they exist has evolved, and the powers of Big Tech has rapidly aligned itself with an authoritarian government. This has lead to another way in which the experience on Big Tech platforms has gotten worse. The alignment of Big Tech with USA’s authoritarian government has shifted the boundaries of what types of speech is allowed and promoted. Conversations around issues coded as left (such as posts about the genocide in Gaza) are much quicker to get downranked in the algorithms, while blatant hatred against immigration is eligible for creator payout systems.
This leads to a dual problem for Bluesky:
- At its core, Bluesky is about building both a Twitter-like platform that avoids some of the major problems that Twitter has, especially regarding platform lock-in, as well as building the AT Protocol that makes this possible. Their tagline on their website makes this clear: “Social media is too important to be controlled by a few corporations. We’re building an open foundation for the social internet so that we can all shape its future.” This made the organisation put the idea of ‘credible exit’ at the center of how they are building ATProto: you can always leave Bluesky for another platform. Their infrastructure architecture has made ‘exit’ possible, you can indeed leave Bluesky for another platform. But the ‘credible’ part is more difficult. Bluesky is at least four orders of magnitude bigger than the next platform on ATProto. This makes exit not particularly credible on a mass scale: exit is possible as an individual, but the rest of the ecosystem is not yet able to handle the traffic and user numbers that Bluesky sees.
- Enshittification, and how to defend against it, is about protecting users from bad behaviours by the company. It has much less to say about how to build resilient networks in the face of authoritarian governments that explicitly want to censor free and legal speech. This requires a different threat model. Bluesky however is squarely focused on the first problem. Their website describes: “The public deserves a thriving online commons. We’re committed to building this space and ensuring that your social network can never be bought by a single individual or organization.” This is a clear reference to enshittification and how Bluesky and ATProto can prevent this problem. It does not say anything about government interference with the platform. This is understandable, considering how rapidly the world has changed in the last 9 months since Trump became president in the US. However, a government that follows up on the recommendations from The Federalist to remove apps that connect to the ATmosphere from the Google and Apple App Stores, requires a different threat model than providing a credible exit.
Building resilient networks in 2025 means not just architecting against enshittification, but against authoritarianism. The infrastructure for ‘credible exit’ that Bluesky promotes may soon need to encompass not just leaving one ATProto platform for another, but also factor in what happens to the entire open social ecosystem when app stores and governments align against it. When authoritarian governments and tech oligarchs coordinate to eliminate spaces for political opposition, the shape of the solutions, both technological and social, need to account for this new threat. The challenge now is to imagine and build infrastructure that can survive not just bad business decisions, but coordinated political suppression. Building resilient social networks now means preparing for a future where being labeled as a ‘left’ space can get your app removed from app stores, and where the act of maintaining an open protocol becomes an act of resistance.
