Well, here’s a shocker, indeed: A thought bubble can get thought-bubbly.
Could you have pictured this? I couldn’t, especially after the very-successful, not-at-all-astroturfed hubbub around X alternative Bluesky after Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it free-speech friendly.
We were all told that Bluesky — a decentralized microblogging platform that launched in 2023 — was going to overtake X because of Elon’s toxicity, since all of the legacy media was headed there. The American left, in particular, wanted to get off of the legacy platform and build something of their own.
Well, why not? After all, as they told conservatives back in the days when we were shut up and shut out of most of the social media algorithms, if we had a problem with it, we could just build our own. I mean, those platforms would be deplatformed themselves if they got popular enough — but that wouldn’t be a problem with Bluesky, not with its leftist cant or its start as a research project within Twitter itself. Surely this growth was all sustainable, correct?
Now, just months after the platform saw its biggest surge of users in the wake of the 2024 election, engagement is down by half and shows no sign of stopping. Moreover, lefty, anti-Trump, billionaire business mogul Mark Cuban — once an enthusiastic and active user of the platform — thinks he knows why: the hateful, “toxic” rhetoric coming out of Bluesky on a daily basis.
Again, a shocker indeed.
“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote in a post earlier this month, according to Fortune. “We are forcing posts to X.”
“Even if you agree with 95 percent of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a grey area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” he added.
In another Bluesky post, Cuban shared how “[t]he lack of diversity of thought here is really hurting usage,” linking a Washington Post article on the topic by Megan McArdle.
Have you ever used Bluesky?
McArdle noted the environment that birthed the Bluesky exodus, particularly the fact that Twitter — while having a numerically smaller user base than Meta platforms like Instagram or Facebook — “had a big group of influential users,” particularly progressives “who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives.”
Things were working out in their favor, until they weren’t and Elon Musk took over, which is when they took their ball and went home, or at least to Bluesky:
Moderation suppressed conservative users and stories that hurt the left — most notoriously, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Twitter throttled as “disinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Of course, progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.
Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later. All that changed when Musk bought Twitter.
It’s not surprising that progressives want to return to the good old days. But it’s not working, and I’m skeptical it ever will.
And, as the Times of India noted, it’s not as if the responses to Cuban’s post made things any better.
“F***in leave then, p****,” one Bluesky response read. Another: “Go wipe your crocodile tears with a wad of hundreds you t***.”
But here I was told the toxicity was due to Elon Musk and free speech returning on X/Twitter and supposedly scaring away users. Yet, it’s not like Bluesky has much to write home about in that department, too, as Cuban noted on the platform:
This is what happens when the left is given its own bubble moderated by lefties: Eventually, everyone comes for everyone else not sufficiently ideologically pure. Just like they did on Twitter in the old days.
And Cuban sounds shocked. Really, I’m shocked it took this long for him to figure it out.
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