Bluesky is booming partly because it doesn't have bad ad tech, AI slop, throttled links, and largely hostile user experiences, unlike some of its big rivals
No bad adtech, no AI, no throttling links. Bluesky is a booming because it's everything big tech is not — Greetings all —
Blood in the MachineBrian Merchant
Context & Ripple Effects
Bluesky’s appeal is arriving after a sharp scale-up: it reported more than 13 million users, a Series A, and plans for feature subscriptions in its October growth and funding update. That makes the service’s product contrast more consequential than its earlier small-community struggles over norms and culture.
The underlying architecture also matters. AT Protocol’s account-portability tooling gives users a clearer exit option than a conventional closed network, while later coverage of possible intent-driven ads underscores that the ad-free positioning is a strategic choice, not necessarily a permanent business model.
First-order effects
Bluesky gains a simple acquisition and retention message: a social feed positioned against intrusive advertising, AI-generated clutter, link friction, and hostile interaction design.
That positioning raises the value of keeping the experience coherent as usage expands; growth is no longer just a community-management issue but central to the product’s differentiation.
Second-order effects
Bluesky’s planned subscription features become more important as a way to fund growth without immediately adopting the ad practices its appeal is being contrasted against.
Competing social services face more pressure to show that feed quality, outbound-link treatment, and user control are product choices rather than unavoidable trade-offs of scale.
Third-order effects
If users continue to reward lower-friction, less synthetic social feeds, network competition may increasingly turn on trust in the feed and governance model—not only audience size or creator reach.
The unresolved constraint is monetization: any future ad system, including the user-intent-driven ads Bluesky’s CEO later discussed, will test whether the service can add revenue without weakening the distinction driving its growth.
The trend: Bluesky is one data point in a broader shift toward social platforms competing on user control, feed integrity, and escape from ad- and AI-heavy experiences.
Meta's user-hostile approach to outbound links worked for them with Instagram but importing it to Threads has been a huge mistake. Sharing is central to being human and, for text-first social networks, sharing links is a core part of the experience. …
“The online world has become so hostile to users that Bluesky's pitch of ‘here is a straightforward feed of text-based user-generated posts that we promise not to mess with’ is revelatory.” —@bcmerchant.bsky.social — www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/blueskys- s...
after 10 years of big social media telling us no one wants posts that link out to other websites, it turns out it was really just the big social media companies that didn't want that [embedded post]
So I don't check my analytics that much, but this is the first time I've noticed that Bluesky topped the list of referrers to Techdirt (for non-search based traffic, Google still sent a lot more). [image]
Here's my best effort to work out why Bluesky blew up over the weekend. Much more than Threads, it's a network that knows what it's *for* www.platformer.news/bluesky- post... [image]
As I write in the post, this does *not in any way guarantee* that either a) Bluesky will succeed in the long term or that b) Bluesky will not succumb ultimately to investor demands to turn a profit at the expense of users. — More concrete policy and steps need to be taken to en…
It should strike us as telling that Bluesky, a platform that puts user design first, offers a unique degree of control, customization, and tools, says it does not train AI on user posts, and does not extract data from users for ads—has more genuine buzz than anything the giants a…
Wrote about how Bluesky is booming because it's giving users precisely what the tech giants are taking away — www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/blueskys- s... [image]
I get why people leave this place, but for me, this is the only place online that captures the feeling of working for a restaurant or bar that's financially unraveling and most of the employees kind hate each other. that's a foundational human experience
20M is a fraction of what X has but what we don't know is the percentage of bots that remain on this platform and if the exodus is key, content-creating members. Either way, I wonder if Musk is concerned https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ...