Why Bluesky Is the Best Social Media Platform

I’m an academic philosopher. Worse, I’m an analytic philosopher. That means I’m meant to love arguments. Confession: I don’t love arguments. They are annoying. They are fiddly. I don’t like crafting my own arguments because I struggle to figure out the premises I need to support my conclusion. I don’t like reading other people’s arguments because I prefer to avoid forming beliefs whenever possible. Arguments get in the way of this preference because I sometimes have to admit that they have some force.

Happily, I’ve come up with an argument that I like. I’ve thought for a while that Bluesky is the best social media platform. There are some reasons to not like Bluesky. But it has one virtue that most other social media platforms lack: it isn’t addictive. More than that, it is boring. It is so boring that you don’t want to spend much time on it. I deleted the app from my phone months ago and I’ve never considered re-installing it. I simply check it on my browser every so often. In contrast, I’ve deleted and re-installed the X app so often I’ve lost count.

If—as I do—you view social media as of little value but are also—as I am—mildly addicted to it then Bluesky is the best because it is the worst. Imagine a world where the only beer available was Tennent’s lager. (If you’re not Scottish: this is horrible brand of beer). Some people would still drink it because some people are alcoholics (a few also claim to like the taste). But most people would simply give up on drinking beer. Bluesky is the Tennent’s lager of social media sites.

As I said I’m an analytic philosopher. So let me try and and put this argument in the form of premises and a conclusion. Here’s a first pass:

1. A good social media platform minimally disrupts your actual life.

2. The main way in which social media platforms disrupt your life is by being addictive.

3. Bluesky does not disrupt your life because it is the opposite of addictive: it is actively boring.

4. Bluesky is a good social media platform.

Let me say a word or two in support of each premise. Premise 3 is widely accepted; the only people who seem to like Bluesky are a small group of very active users. Everyone else is increasingly bored of it. So we should focus on premises 1 and 2, which is where the action is.

There are many reasons why people are worried about social media: it is warping our brains, it is fomenting civil discord, it is a hotbed of fake news and misinformation. Some think it is the main cause of rising rates of mental health problems in young people, particularly teenage girls. But these sorts of reasons have an underlying political valence, typically left wing (worries about social media and mental health might be an exception). The reason I offer for being worried about social media is more ecumenical and should enjoy multi-partisan support: it sucks up huge amounts of our time and attention. The main way in which it does this is by being incredibly addictive.

There are however two problem with this first pass version of the argument. The first is that it only shows that Bluesky is a good social media platform, not that it is the best one. There may be another social media platform that is even better than Bluesky by the metric of being extremely boring. The second problem is that, if all that can be said about Bluesky is that it is boring, it is unclear why anyone uses it, or should use it. But for a platform to be the best social media platform it is surely a requirement that people actually have a reason to use it.

There is a better version of the argument that can avoid both objections. It starts by noting that there are reasons why someone might use a social media platform even if it is boring. Take Facebook, for example, which has been a car crash for as long as anyone can remember. Why do people still use it? I suspect the main reason is a combination of inertia and network effects; closing an old Facebook account would mean finding a new way of keeping in touch with the people you primarily keep in touch with over Facebook. So why isn’t Facebook a better social media platform than Bluesky? Setting aside the question of whether it is quite as tedious, the problem is that for many users the network effects are extremely strong, so much so that they provide a reason to check it fairly regularly. Bluesky is a newer platform, with a user base that is orders of magnitude smaller, and so the network effects are significantly smaller. But they still exist, hence why I still check it from time to time, albeit less regularly than Facebook.

Here then is the better version of the argument:

1. The best social media platform minimally disrupts your actual life while still providing sufficient reason for use.

2. The main way social media platforms disrupt your life is by being addictive, which might be due to the addictive nature of the content on the platform, or the network effects associated with it.

3. Bluesky provides just enough network effects to justify occasional use, but not enough to create addictive checking patterns.

4. No other social media platform achieves such an optimal balance of minimal disruption with sufficient utility.

5. Bluesky is the best social media platform.

This version avoids both problems with the original argument. Premise 4 is, I must admit, a hostage to fortune: another social media platform may come along that strikes an even more optimal balance than Bluesky. But, until that happens, Bluesky is the best social media platform.