Many Bluesky users seem a little irked at the moment over a Bluesky post quoting the platform’s CEO Toni Schneider. In it, he said he wants Bluesky to shift away from being a liberal bubble. “‘Breaking’ is maybe the wrong word, but yes, we want to expand more and more so that Bluesky means not just one thing, not just liberal politics, for example,” Schneider said.
One interpretation of Schneider’s remark, which was pulled from a video posted earlier today by the Verge, is that Schneider wants Bluesky to be inundated with conservatives. “Did you ask him to describe the sort of person he thinks isn’t here but ought to be?” asked one user in a reply. Another user replied to that reply with “You know… Nazis who speak with a smile.”
Somehow managing to flood Bluesky with right-wingers could certainly pop the liberal bubble, but Schneider actually did give an example of who else he thinks should be on Bluesky: sports fans.
Here’s another excerpt:
“What we’re focusing on is to deliver a live experience.
We do it around elections. We do it around sports as well, very successfully, where the people on the network that participate get a really good experience and get really good content. Once we have that, then hopefully we can just keep expanding to more and more types of users and use cases.”
In fairness, some Bluesky users seem exasperated at the superficial reaction to the Schneider quote. “Good lord I wish some of you could read on this text based social media website,” the user Scoiattolo wrote. They included a screenshot of the quote above.
I don’t know if you follow sports on X, the everything app, but while it is pretty good at feeding you news updates about the sports teams you follow, it also shows you a ton of recycled and deceptive clips, along with mountains of sports engagement bait.
Bluesky’s cleaner, more civil, less spammy environment is an improvement in some ways, even if Bluesky is still not quite the raucous sports watch party experience you can get on X. The Trending module on Bluesky is good at reminding you games are on, and knowers of ball are on Bluesky, posting insightful and funny second screen content.
At the moment it’s easy to get the impression that the sports fans of Bluesky are of the “liberal” “progressive” or “leftist” political persuasion. For what it’s worth, Schneider says his company has “made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports writers, and it’s worked really well.” He says, per the Verge, there’s “a ton of sports conversations now on the app, and those people come here for the sports, not for the liberal politics.”
Sports talk, and all other user behavior, according to Schneider “needs to be civil and positive and we need to have the tools that if it goes off the rails, people can regulate it and can have a good experience instead of it just devolving into a shouting match.”
But Bluesky is already famous for its blocking culture, in which users block early and often instead of shouting, helped along by the unusual design of the block feature on Bluesky, which is so comprehensive that it makes it feel like the blocked account has been deleted from the universe.
This certainly contributes to the bubble feeling the site is often criticized for. But while this can arguably shelter users from unwelcome opinions, there’s also a practical side: Bluesky users also tend to block people because they just don’t vibe with them, and that’s not necessarily bad.
What Schneider is dreaming of makes sense, even if it’s not currently what Bluesky users get for the most part: a platform where users show up to see highly curated, non-spammy, civil discourse about live events they’re passionate about.
Unfortunately, whether this image is what Schneider intends or not, it’s also sort of like the dream of an “electronic village” propagated in the mid-90s, a time that’s kinda sad to reflect on now. After all, we’ve had the technology for an interconnected village for decades, but instead of making humans bond and love one another, most people here in the 2020s feel like social media platforms created more problems. And can yet another social media site plausibly fix them?
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