I had never been a member of an underground movement before. I’d seen films, of course, which made getting involved look both risky and somewhat tedious. But the funny thing about desperate measures is that, by the time you take them, they often seem like the only reasonable course of action. All this is by way of saying I’ve joined Bluesky.
It’s a lot like Twitter, in that it has a newsfeed, similar functionality and is, as far as I can tell, populated largely by FT journalists. What distinguishes Bluesky, at least for the moment, is its users.
The platform is currently invite-only, which both limits its growth and means I am very cool. It has more than 1.5 million users, a figure that tends to jump every time Elon Musk opens his mouth, like when he floated the idea of charging everyone to use the platform. (Would you knowingly give that man your bank details?)
It’s tedious at this point to itemise what’s wrong with Twitter. But the Israel-Hamas conflict has brought to the fore just how thoroughly — and deliberately — Musk broke it. It is now impossible to verify if someone is a credible source or just a guy paying $8 per month. If we were arguing about whether a dress was blue or gold, it would be annoying. In a war, it’s potentially catastrophic.
It feels genteel - I've been to rowdier airport lounges. This is part of its charm, but also its biggest problem
The first thing to note about Bluesky is how genteel the place feels. I’ve been to rowdier airport lounges. This is part of its initial charm — there are notably fewer open fascists, bots or blue-tick warriors. But it’s also its biggest problem.
Bluesky isn’t the only tech nation fighting for scraps in the war of Twitter succession. There is Mastodon, which I never got the hang of, and most famously Meta’s Threads, which opened with a bang so bright it could only be matched by the launch of Google+.
The smallness of the site is another problem. It’s 1.5 million users sounds like a lot, but Twitter has (or at least had) hundreds of millions of active monthly users. Whether or not there is wisdom in crowds, there is certainly in continents, even if the Musk algorithm was making it ever more difficult to find. Bluesky enjoys less of the sense that Twitter once shared with live sport: that anything could happen.
Starting again is annoying, too. You can’t simply import everyone you followed in “the other place” (by the way, if Twitter is the House of Commons, Bluesky is definitely the Lords). Even worse, you can’t demand that people who followed you there do so here. I could ask them, but that strikes me as a little needy.
Perhaps the greatest disadvantage Bluesky offers compared with Twitter is that I can no longer blame the deafening sound of crickets that greets each of my posts on the unfairness of the Musk algorithm.
But then, something wonderful happened this morning. Scrolling through Bluesky, expecting more discourse about the app’s functionality or the latest offering in the FT canteen, I came across the most deranged, sweary, nonsense take I’d seen in days. If this were Twitter, I’d have deployed the block button. Instead, for the first time in a long while, I felt at home.
And finally...
US Speaker chaos raises concerns for next election
I have a rule: no mentioning US politics without first discussing the fortunes of a European leader not named Emmanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz. But I’m going to break it to talk about Jim Jordan, who may or may not be Speaker of the House of Representatives one day soon.
Now might be a good time to mention that two-thirds of Republicans in the House at the time objected to certifying that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Jordan was one of them.
If the present chaos reminds you of the failed indicative votes on Brexit, it shouldn’t. Because whatever you thought of Oliver Letwin taking over the order paper, he never actually sought to overturn the referendum result by fiat.
So my question is this: is there a Republican who could both be elected Speaker and certify that someone other than Donald Trump wins the 2024 election? I have my doubts.
