Stick a Pin in Bluesky. It's Dead

 

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." -William Gibson, Neuromancer

     I joined Bluesky February last year with the intention of transitioning from Elmo's blue bird. I'd heard good things about it, about how it promised to be a liberal haven (ironically sneered at by right wingers about it being a "liberal echo chamber"). Then Donald Trump stole the 2024 election as he had the 2016 election. Outrage was swift. 

     The day after election night last year I lost at least 500 followers on Twitter. The exodus continued for weeks thereafter. I reached a peak of just 4100 followers on Twitter and now, even with new followers, I'm down to 3374. It had appeared as if the liberal accounts were neatly transitioning from the blue bird to the blue butterfly.

     But then, after Bluesky hit 21,000,000 users by the end of November last year, I noticed a dropoff in activity and engagement. Right after election night, people put me on what were known as "starter packs", lists of people on Bluesky that others were invited to follow. When I followed these people, they immediately followed me back, often within seconds.

     Then I noticed the starter packs dried up. My posts were no longer getting engagements.  Likes, reposts, dried up to literally nothing. Engagement on the site had flatlined.

     So I went to Elmo's Grok 3 to ask about Bluesky's numbers just to ensure that I wasn't imagining things.

     I wasn't. 

     Grok gave me results from sites such as Backlinko and other companies that track social media data and traffic. And the results were to say the least, dispiriting and depressing. According to a July 17 post on Backlinko, between November 5th, election day, and November 6th, Bluesky's growth had exploded by 13%. The company's executives bragged that they'd topped 21,000,000 before December 2024. But since then, there's been a steady decline.

    DAUs, or Daily Active Users, now number 4.1 million. But the alarming statistic is that only 11% of Bluesky's users post daily. After hitting 30,000,000 users in January, they've only added 6,000,000 more. So I wasn't imagining things. If you use social media as much as I have since 2009, you just develop a sense about these things.

     And, as anyone who's used social media for a New York minute can tell you, it doesn't matter how many users you have. It's about engagement. Lack of engagement is a lack of life. And if people don't receive the engagement they expect, then they'll use it less and less before they just stop posting entirely.

     Bluesky's 35.9 million users may sound impressive until you compare it to Twitter's 600,000,000 users (although countless millions are obviously bots, which Elmo now suddenly doesn't seem to care about), Tiktok's 1.5 billion and Facebook's 3 billion (although many of those accounts are hacked, spoofed or dead accounts). Even Facebook's Threads (which had its own sugar rush years ago before flatlining) and its 275,000,000 users makes Bluesky look sick by comparison.

     Even if the rosiest projections hold true (and they probably won't considering the fast-waning interest in Bluesky) and they hit 53,000,000 users by December, they'll still pale in comparison to the larger social media sites out there.

     In a way, it was inevitable. Bluesky never did get away from the impression that it was a pale clone of Twitter. It took them months to activate Twitter hashtags, which made it look more like a Twitter clone than ever, and it took executives months before they could even emulate Twitter's features, such as posting pictures, videos and gifs. Since there are no ads, they're still operating on a revenue-free model, which will further hasten its obsolescence. After years, they still don't offer analytics, which is key to tracking personal engagement as well as on a macro scale.

     In a nutshell, this means that Bluesky is destined to become the next Friendster or Myspace. I'd decided today to stop using it entirely. If people aren't paying attention to you, then it subverts the very idea of social media. You're basically yelling in a tomb or down an empty well.

     But, while I never once thought Bluesky would be the last hope for the future of America and the progressive movement, it nonetheless serves as a synecdoche for the progressive movement as a whole well beyond Bluesky.

     It's all about staying power, the desire for growth and a sustained commitment to liberal ideals. It's about a lack of heart. Yes, we made a good pretense of supporting each other in the first few weeks after Election Day but then the entire domain flatlined. Those supportive accounts proved to worse than fair weather friends.

     So, a thinking person has to ask, "Where goes Bluesky, so goes the 2026 midterms?" It has to be asked.

      We've been hearing about this "blue tsunami" that will sweep Republicans out of power at least in the House. And, historically, over the last four decades or so, the administration's party loses at least one chamber in the next midterms. Considering the razor-thin majority that Republicans nervously eye in the House and the three seats Republicans have in the Senate, it's easy to be optimistic about the Democratic Party's chances November next year.

     The problem is, the Democratic Party hasn't given its voters any reason to believe they'll do anything meaningful with a majority in either chamber. They've yet to tell those voters why they should give them that majority. It's always risky to see a correlation between voter engagement and social media engagement, But the overall impression I'm getting is that we're beaten, deflated and we're acting like it.

     And the Democratic Party isn't giving people any reason get excited about them and that's because the party is taking them and their votes for granted. Between the Old Guard New York Democrats refusing to endorse Mamdani for New York City mayor and the disaster of the DNC kicking out David Hogg as DNC Vice Chairman, they're leaving a sour taste in the mouths of voters. Take a look at the New York City Democratic mayoral primary results:

      Zohran Mamdani got only 469,602 on primary night last month. Granted, far fewer voters come out for a primary than they do in general elections but you would still expect a popular candidate like Mamdani to get a hell of a lot more votes than he'd gotten in a city of nearly 10,000,000 people. And the only reason he won the mayoral Democratic primary was because of the city's ranked choice voting because he fell far short of the 50% on the first ballot to get the nomination.

     Incidentally, the breakdown of registered voters in New York City as if November last year is thus:

• Democratic Party: Approximately 3.4 million registered voters
• Republican Party: Approximately 573,644 registered voters
• Non-affiliated (Independents): Approximately 1,155,323 registered voters

      Out of 3.4 million Democratic voters, plus well over 1.1 million more unaffiliated voters, Mamdani still only got fewer than half a million to vote for him in the most populous city in the nation. I'd say that's a serious enthusiasm gap, especially in a blue city that historically has been renowned for its political engagement.

      In terms of social media engagement and political activity, the old show business bromide holds true: "Give the people what they want and they'll come out for it." And, there's the unspoken followup: If you don't give them what they want, they won't turn out. And in the progressive movement right now, there's a quiet, unarticulated defeatism that makes it a lot easier to drift into the shadows than it is to stay in the fight.

     In other words, we're giving the right wing exactly what they've been aiming for since forever-That nothing we do will make a difference. That's it's always easier to give up and just hope for a better outcome that isn't on the horizon.