🔒 Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bluesky?

 When Twitter was hijacked by a wealthy ideologue back in 2022 to amplify far-right voices and serve as a recruitment tool for the MAGA movement, the market did what the market tends to do and spat out a dozen alternatives for those who weren’t happy with the situation to migrate to. Many of them were sort of just clones of Twitter. Only one of them is routinely pilloried by the mainstream media as a dangerous and even socially harmful den of toxicity.

 But it’s not the one that the billionaire owns and pays alt-right influencers to fill up with white nationalist slop. It’s not even the one owned and controlled by the United States’ fashy president. The one platform that faces the bulk of the media’s ire is Bluesky. The lefty one.

 I’m not going to lie and tell you that much of Bluesky isn’t a big old lefty circlejerk and I’m not even going to tell you that it isn’t obnoxious. Here’s a hard to swallow pill for you: Every social media platform is obnoxious. I personally find Bluesky less obnoxious than most of the other options because I, like you, tend to find things less obnoxious when they broadly approach my own position on things. In short, “wokescolds” can be annoying, but I’ll take them any day of the week over a Roman statue/Pepe the Frog avatar dogpile.

 Nevertheless, there’s just something about this one platform that drives some columnists apoplectic. The recent volley of attacks started with WaPo columnist Megan McArdle whose piece reflects this common but unsubstantiated idea that Twitter is and will forever be the only platform on the internet where political influence can be developed and brokered, so leftists abandoning it to go hang out on some other site that might as well be the Siberia of cyberspace merely forfeits the only platform that will ever matter and leaves it the sole property of the far right.

 Don’t misinterpret this warning as McArdle being sympathetic to the left’s mission for political influence. McArdle is one of many columnists in her political bracket who believes the Democratic party needs to move to the right to win elections. She buys into the Taibbi/Shellenberger narrative of a vast conspiracy on pre-Musk Twitter to censor conservatives, and claims this narrative manipulation led the Democratic party to falsely believe that left-wing views are popular.

 So now that Elon has thrown up an UNO Reverse card, literally prioritizing right-wing views and suppressing left-wing ones, we should be square, right? Why write a whole op-ed complaining about Bluesky?

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