After watching Bluesky's moderation team reveal their hand and make it painfully clear that they are either unwilling or unable to effectively moderate their platform, and subsequently watching the people they threw under the bus get mad about it, but ultimately fail to convert that energy into any meaningful movement or action against Bluesky as a platform, I have to ask…

What the fuck are we doing here?

Isn't this why people moved off of X? Because their moderation was rendered incapable of doing their job? Or was it because of the hostile takeover by one of the richest men in the world, for the purposes of turning it into a right-wing propaganda machine? No, it couldn't have been that - the exodus would have been over a year ago if that was it.

Maybe that's the question here. What was the tipping point for everyone stuck on X? What was it that made people realise that they have to get out of there now? Was it Elon? Was it Trump? Was it the AI wave? Was it anything about X itself? No, I don't think so. I've got my theory. It was Bluesky.

Social media seems to have a bit of a differentiation problem. Go look at Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon (and just about everything else on ActivityPub), Tumblr, Nostr, Hive Social - fuck, even Gab and Truth Social. It's all the same fucking shape. No one wants to try anything new anymore - just make the same thing over and over again in the desperate hope that maybe this time, it'll work.

And it never does. It never works. The shape of these sites just isn't conducive to forming healthy, positive communities. But it's not just that alone. There's something underlying this shape, driving it forward. There's a reason this shape keeps appearing. What's that reason? Capital. Big, stinky venture capital.

Twitter was the big breakout win in the microblogging space. Twitter got huge. If anyone could have claimed to be the town square of the internet, Twitter was one of the few serious contenders. And with that many people flocking over to it, you bet your ass investors wanted to get their grubby mitts all over it.

Everyone wanted a piece of Twitter. So everyone kept making Twitter, hoping they'd be able to get their piece of that success. And some did! But look at what it's done to the state of social media - everything is Twitter now. Twitter is the only thing that exists. For a lot of people (especially us younger zoomers), Twitter is the only thing that's ever existed.

But then Twitter went sour. Their moderation started to get worse. The right-wing started to really infest the place. Elon came along and accelerated that infestation. At some point, the frog boiling got a bit too fast, and it broke the bonds of the network effect - people had to get away from there. But where would they go?

Threads? No, everyone knows Old Man Zuck has bad vibes. Mastodon? No, it's too confusing, and full of nerds. Tumblr? It was a contender for a while, but their moderation was getting pretty rough too. Cohost? Maybe - if you were willing to deal with the intentional discovery and Numbers limitations, plus the general uncertainty of it all.

But Bluesky? That's a fresh slate. It works just like Twitter - hell, it literally came out of Twitter. Moderation? Maybe - they haven't had a chance to prove themselves yet, it could work. They're even talking about that whole “decentralisation” thing that all those Mastodon nerds love!

It was perfect timing. Right when X got too unbearable for people to stay, Bluesky was there and ready to offer a brand new “Twitter 2” - a place people could move without any user friction, save for the inevitable lag of the network effect. But now that it's caught up, Bluesky has solidified itself as “the place where everyone went after X”.

We should have seen the failures coming from a mile away. I did - it's why I didn't jump to Bluesky right after Cohost shut down. It was doomed to repeat the same failings as Twitter/X, because it's just the same thing again- same design, same founders, same venture capital dependence, same moderation philosophies. But that's the appeal, isn't it?

The shape of social media needs to change. We can't keep jumping into the same thing and hoping, praying that this time they'll get it right, only to be swiftly disappointed when the marginalised and most vulnerable inevitably get sacrificed at the very same altar everyone is praying at. No more praying - it's time to start designing.

Our social spaces need to be consciously designed to resist bigotry, harassment, and vitriol, and to foster community, acceptance, and healthy engagement. Twitter was only one of the possible shapes of social media, and it's failed. It's time to move on.

We don't need to make Twitter again. Our communities aren't beholden to capital and the Rot Economy - they're beholden to us. We have to build spaces that serve each other - because if we don't, they'll never be free of the harm and exploitation that underlies the foundation of everything that's come before us.

What does that look like? I've got ideas. The Fediverse is certainly not without it's flaws, but I think its model of federation and decentralisation is a step in the right direction. Allowing smaller, intentional, independent groups to all coalesce into a larger fabric of groups freely associating with each other is a solid idea in my opinion, and I'd like to see it explored further.

Where I feel the Fediverse breaks down, unfortunately, is the lack of intention in it's structure. Putting all of these groups in the same room and just expecting them to get the unwritten vibe was never going to work. Intention is key - a collective of groups can only be cohesive when there's something underlying their unification, and the Fediverse just doesn't have that consistency.

The concept of “island networks” is starting to catch on within Fediverse-adjacent spaces - networks where communication between groups is opt-in, not opt-out. Island networks are a way to bring that intentionality back to the model of the Fediverse, and I, personally, believe this is a direction worth - at the very least - some experimentation with.

Hell, I believe in it so much that I'm working on making it happen - the Website League is an attempt at exactly this model. It's built of smaller groups all agreeing to come together under a shared set of rules and values to form one cohesive network. It's early days now, and it's still quite Twitter-y due to us using off-the-shelf software to get started, but we're here to experiment with new website designs too.

To bring all of this together - the current problems with Bluesky aren't new. They're an inevitability brought about by it's decision to be little more than another Twitter, save for some theoretical decentralization sprinkled in. If we, the members of social media spaces, want to meaningfully escape these problems, we have to start doing things differently.

It's time to explore new ideas. It's time to learn from the past failures. It's time to make something truly, meaningfully new. Because if we just keep trying to do Twitter over and over again, we're never going to have places where we can truly feel safe.