Oh No, Bluesky Has Broken Containment

This morning, Bluesky announced that potential users no longer need an invite code to sign up. It’s all over, folks. You can stop hoarding those precious codes. You’re not cool anymore.

As a misanthropic hermit with no friends, I originally rolled my eyes at Bluesky. You needed an invite code to join? You needed to actually know people? Screw that! Everything changed, however, when a friend of mine (okay, I guess I do have a few) got in on the action, and sent me one of his codes. It was so quiet on Bluesky. No longer did I spend my time scrolling past endless screaming matches between bots and sock puppets. No more did I have to block hordes of antisemites and misogynists.

Of course, it’s hard to replicate Twitter without replicating its problems, and the bigotry and trolling that rendered Twitter unusable soon began to infect Bluesky, too. Last summer, for instance, the platform issued apologies after it failed to prevent users from creating racist account handles.

Now, the invite code system is gone, and anyone can create an account. Bluesky announced the change on its blog, and coupled it with a comic strip by Davis Bickford. The comic makes some lofty promises, assuring users that the site’s moderation tools will effectively block the trolls who are no doubt flooding the site as I write this article. The comic also compares the platform to a fairy tale castle. Sounds nice!

Anyway, to sign up for Bluesky, you can now head over to bsky.app, click “create an account,” and get started. That’s it. Three steps, and you’re done.

Will Bluesky turn into Twitter?

Who knows? Even before Elon Musk got rid of Twitter’s moderation system and started sucking up to Nazis, Twitter was pretty awful. Any statement, no matter how benign, could be misread and twisted into something criminal. The worst thing that could happen to someone was becoming Twitter’s main character.

Researchers Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd called the phenomenon “context collapse”: a joke or observation meant for a specific audience goes viral, readers don’t realize that they’re missing context, and suddenly thousands of people are upset over something they don’t even know they don’t understand. “The frequency of context-destruction is no accident,” writes philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. “Twitter rewards high-context speech, and then gives us the perfect tool to decontextualize that speech. Twitter is designed to invite our vulnerability, and then punish it.”

So, now that Bluesky is open to everyone, will it fall prey to the same problems? Maybe. Or maybe Bluesky will learn from Twitter’s mistakes.

In the meantime, I’m getting my blocking finger ready.

(featured image: Enes Evren / Getty Images)