Bluesky is seeing an influx of users, including @dril and AOC, with some referring to posting on the Jack Dorsey-backed social network as “skeeting”
Instead of “tweeting,” the influx of new Bluesky users has coined a new term for sharing their thoughts on the decentralized social media app.
DecryptStephen Graves
Context & Ripple Effects
Bluesky’s early product was framed as a federated network with a familiar, simpler social format. Its waiting-list opening had already driven a sharp rise in iOS downloads, creating the conditions for a small but visible user culture to form quickly.
The arrival of recognizable accounts makes that culture more legible beyond early adopters. Later coverage of the platform’s dispute over the term “skeets” shows that naming, norms, and governance were becoming operational issues alongside user growth.
First-order effects
Bluesky gains immediate attention and social proof from the participation of @dril, AOC, and other incoming users, increasing the value of joining for audiences seeking those voices.
Users—not the company—are establishing vocabulary for posting, giving the service a distinctive identity but reducing Bluesky’s control over how its core interaction is described.
Second-order effects
A growing, high-profile audience raises pressure on Bluesky to set and communicate community norms; the later pushback on “skeets” illustrates how quickly informal conventions can become a platform-management problem.
Rival text-based social services face a clearer retention challenge when public figures and influential posters begin testing an alternative network, even before its user base is broadly mature.
Third-order effects
If federation and recognizable-user migration reinforce each other, social-network competition may hinge less on a single incumbent feed and more on whether new networks can sustain portable communities and coherent governance.
The episode points to decentralized social platforms’ recurring trade-off: openness can accelerate culture formation, while the operator still needs enough authority to manage norms as scale increases.
The trend: This is an early example of federated social networks using creator and public-figure migration to turn technical alternatives into culturally distinct communities.
Look the bluesky vs Mastodon thing is simple. Mastodon is free and open source software full of earnest, well meaning people talking about things politely. The first post i saw on bluesky was someone doing a juul pod summoning circle for egirls and they're calling posts “skeets”
Can't believe Elon didn't put a “please do not built a website to compete with the one I paid you double the value of with the proceeds of this sale” in the contract he signed with Jack
Fine. FINE. If someone has a spare Bluesky invite and they want to see my smiling face over there, I guess I'll check it out. It's starting to feel like a full time job just signing up to new social networks, at this point.
Everyone who was an earnest and polite person left Twitter for Mastodon months ago and nobody cared, but now all the weird little freaks and gremlins are bailing for Bluesky, which actually has momentum
The real lesson of Bluesky is that people are going to it, and even though it's ostensibly “federated” and “decentralized” nobody cares. People will just use the corporate instance of it. Mastadon's mistake was thinking anyone actually cared about the “pick your server” part.
ME IN 2022: hm i wonder how elon running twitter will go TIME TRAVELER FROM 2023: bad ME: how bad TT: you know that “decentralized social media” thing jack dorsey's working on? ME: lol yeah TT: you're gonna be on that ME: i... what? oh wow TT: and you're gonna like it ME: jesus
The young people don't realize we've already had to join ICQ, AIM, LiveJournal, Blogspot, Skype, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Snapchat just to get to this point. We just want to be done.