Why I Don't Trust or Like BlueSky

Saturday, February 22, 2025

Regarding Trust

BlueSky is a for-profit enterprise. While its charter includes a commitment to balancing public good with profit, that’s not the same as a true public-interest project like Linux, Mozilla, or Mastodon. At some point, it will need a monetization model—ads, selling user data, subscriptions, or some mix of all three.

You can decentralize the servers all you want, but without a real safeguard (akin to Copyleft), there’s nothing stopping Bluesky from becoming ripe for acquisition by Microsoft or Meta once it reaches critical mass.

The Politics of BlueSky

What bothers me politically is how dominated it feels by North American liberals and neo-liberal Democrats, constantly dunking on the other half of the U.S. electorate. (There’s probably a name for the non-stop “Look What Nazi Thing Elon Did Today” posting.)

This isn’t about false equivalence—Trump’s America is a disaster, even by the standards of the Clintons, who everyone assumed perfected the art of selling out their own base. Fuck Trump and his ever-rotating cast of henchmen. But at the same time, the so-called “left” in the U.S. has convinced itself that it can rebuild America into a compassionate, inclusive society while simultaneously balls-out openly hating half its own population. Nobody seems to seriously question or even challenge this line.

There’s no moral equivalence between the two sides, but both have a deep aversion to nuance and both are equally performative (MAGA vs. Woke). The theatrics dominates the public discourse, and BlueSky has become the staging ground for anti-Trump outrage. BlueSky is being used by people making the problem worse. 

Why I’m Uninterested

I have no patience for a platform where the majority of accounts are trapped in perpetual hand-wringing. They live in a constant state of shock, never once taking responsibility for their own failure to read the room, their own miscalculations, or their own ongoing ineptitude at resistance. They demand accountability from others but never acknowledge their own role in the society they helped create.

Instead, platforms like BlueSky could be used by anti-Trump types to organize actions, and if they did, that could turn the whole thing around in 2 weeks, a month tops. Only organizing works. Just ask the multitude of free democracies today who were full-blown dictatorships 50 years ago, but overturned by peaceful organizing. 

BlueSky feels like where you go when that sounds like too much work for you, and you’d rather complain and be shocked by the consequences of your inaction.