• ·June 29, 2025

How would you feel if the only people you could call or text using your phone were people who were using the same carrier as you? If you were on Verizon, for example, you couldn’t call your best friend who uses T-Mobile as their phone provider. If you wanted to call or text your best friend, you would have to open up a second account on T-Mobile. Maybe the accounts themselves would be free as long as you watched ads and agreed to allow T-Mobile to sell data about your activity to the highest bidder. Would you be ok with that scenario?

Or think about email. What if you could only send emails to people who used the same email provider? Your work email, for example, could only send email to other people at your work. If you had a GMail account, you could only email other people who also had GMail accounts. If you wanted to send an email to someone using Yahoo or some other email provider, you would need to sign up for an account using that same provider. How would you feel about it?

These might seem like ridiculous scenarios for phone numbers and email accounts, but it is exactly the situation we put up with when we use most modern social media platforms. A friend recently asked me to recommend a Facebook alternative. She was sick of Meta’s politics and wanted to cut ties with their tools. But she has lots of friends that she communicates with primarily through Facebook and she didn’t want to lose contact with them. Unfortunately, if she wants to maintain that network of friends, she is stuck with using Meta’s tools. Facebook and most modern social media platforms rely on proprietary software that implements proprietary communication protocols. A protocol is simply a set of rules for how to communicate. Facebook, X, Tiktok, etc. each implement their own, secret set of rules for communication and in order to use those rules, you have to use the applications they have built. If you don’t like something about how the application works, your only choice is to leave the application entirely which also means leaving whatever network of people you have cultivated on that application.

But of course, phones and email don’t work like that. And social media platforms don’t need to either. There is no technical reason that social media platforms need to use proprietary protocols. That’s where Bluesky comes in. Bluesky is a micro-blogging site. That means that it’s a place where users post short (micro) content, mostly text and images. Unlike many other social media platforms, Bluesky doesn’t downrank links so you can create content on another site and easily post a link to that content and Bluesky will include the post in your followers’ feed just as though it didn’t have a link. Instagram, for example, doesn’t allow posts with links. Facebook downranks posts with links because Meta wants users to create their content completely within the closed environment of Facebook. In addition, Bluesky gives users lots of control over how their feed appears (unlike sites like Facebook and Instagram). Lists are a very cool feature of the application. Anyone can build a list of accounts that they like and share that list with others to either follow or block. For example, I used several lists to find astrophotographers to follow. I have found lots of indie game designers and activists resisting fascism and so on. The communities that I have found are engaged and supportive. I love interacting with smart, creative people. But the most important thing that I like about Bluesky is that it is built on top of an open protocol called AT Protocol. That means that developers are able to create different applications that can communicate with Bluesky users. So if you don’t like how Bluesky is dealing with posts or your data, you can look for other applications to use and not lose the communities that you have connected with in Bluesky. There aren’t a lot of other applications available using the AT Protocol yet but they are coming. The ethos of Bluesky is very similar to the Indie Web and I know several folks in that community are building tools for users to implement on their own web sites.

There are several other, more technical reasons that I like Bluesky but the fact that it is so far living up to its ambition to free social media users from centralized corporate control of our content and our attention is the main reason that I recommend checking it out. And if you do create an account, follow me and I’ll follow you back. You can find me @cathieleblanc.bsky.social.