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Like any good citizen of the internet, I went hunting for memes when I first heard the news. Rachel Dolezal, the notorious race grifter who courted controversy in 2015, had been fired from her teaching gig for operating an OnlyFans account. I was in need of a good laugh. Only, I wasn’t having much luck.
I happened to be in foreign territory, on Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-endorsed social media app hailed as The Next Big Thing, when News4 Tucson broke the story. A specter of a bygone era, Dolezal is considered Peak Internet. In June of 2015, while serving as president of a local NAACP chapter in Washington state, she was outed for lying about her racial identity. Although born a white woman, Dolezal was posing as Black.
Debates ensued. There were thinkpieces, and thinkpieces about those thinkpieces. Everyone had an opinion about her, saying she was co-opting a culture she had no right to, wearing a kind of blackface for personal gain. “Why can’t Rachel Dolezal transcend race?” Barrie Freidland asked in the Baltimore Sun. Ultimately Dolezal resigned and moved on with her life. That was the story, anyway, until News4 reported that she was now going by Nkechi Diallo, was living in Arizona, and had been recently let go from her teaching position in the Catalina Foothills district after officials there discovered she was moonlighting as a sex worker on OnlyFans.
The bounty and curse of social media are its users, and reaction was volcanic across several platforms as the news made its rounds—except on Bluesky, where the overall temperature was one of balmy disinterest. Dolezal’s local scandal isn’t exactly a litmus test for the app, but it does underline what Bluesky lacks: a harmony of difference.
The app opened its doors to the public this month, and genuinely curious what it had to offer, I decided to devote my first 48 hours to finding out, forgoing my typical media diet: doomscrolling Twitter, ogling TikTok videos shared in group chats, lurking on Instagram. I happened upon a few casual jabs—“A horny cringe demon is summoned from the internet archives. Pandora, close the damn box,” writer Saeed Jones posted—but the response was relatively tame. There was chatter about the shooting at the Chiefs Super Bowl parade. I even stumbled across a sweet photo of Alexander Chee's french bulldog, Freya, who has a particular liking for the sound of wind chimes. Yet news of Dolezal's firing could barely produce a decent meme.
My WIRED colleague Kate Knibbs is correct that Bluesky is “easy to use, but that’s because it’s so unoriginal—if you’ve ever tweeted, you’ll be familiar with the interface.” There’s a lightness to interaction that recalls so much of what I loved about social media’s sunrise years: posting for the pure fun of it. Still, I kept waiting for more to happen. I kept wanting more to happen. The first day especially was wasted by the tedium of finding people to follow, curating the flow and types of conversation that fit my needs. And of the conversation taking place, very little seemed to be happening in real time.
Part of that is a people problem. According to estimates from Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company, when Bluesky ended invite-only memberships it had nearly 2 million active users on Android, compared with its previous daily average of 600,000. Three days after opening the platform, Similarweb found that Bluesky’s Android daily active user count had dropped by 25 percent. (The company did not have estimates to share for iOS users.) The sudden slump resembled the same boom-and-bust pattern that occurred with Threads, making plain the difficulty in preserving the appeal of new social platforms in an already crowded ecosystem.
The life cycle of the social internet is one of tenacious rebirth, and it could be that my current frustration is about having to start over. Are we doomed to rebuild our digital presence every few years as platforms die out and new ones replace them?
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The sour reality of it doesn’t make what’s happening in this moment any less persuasive. There is excitement in what awaits us on the other side, in what comes next. The addictive mojo of the social internet is in what it grants us: the ability—the privilege—to tap into new modes of interaction and being. Only, Bluesky doesn’t offer that.
As social media struggles to evolve into its next era, determining its function and purpose in our daily lives, it does not need more of the same copy-and-paste “disruption” we’ve gotten embarrassingly accustomed to in the past decade, despite those of us who yearn for the internet days of yore. Feeds like Blacksky, Book Sky, and After Dark read as attempts to recapture the chemistry of Twitter’s most robust and influential set of users. There’s an instinctive allure to want to bottle that magic and replicate it over and over. Nostalgia is tricky like that—but is it really what this inflection point in the evolution of social media calls for?
The mechanics of being online now require an unreasonable commitment to performance; you opt into the algorithm not because you have dreams of being an influencer selling new age hand creams—or maybe you do!—but because by choosing to detach you’ve opted out of a future that actually requires your participation on some level. Social media has made it that the harvest of digital production never stops. Coming to terms with being online in 2024 is to realize that you must water the land in your own way, because complete disconnection won’t work.
For Twitter exiles weary of how Elon Musk has decimated that platform, Bluesky is their answer. I get why they left. Twitter is not the Twitter it once was—but what social media app is?
Like most millennials, my online adulthood is an education in digital self-expression. Since teenhood I have tirelessly tried out different representations of myself. I chased cool and acceptance on Myspace. I found friendship on Facebook. Yet it was Twitter and Instagram that mirrored the best of social media’s present. Its purpose in the seeming change that was sweeping the United States with the election of Barack Obama was no fluke. The alchemy and intoxication of the moment was like a drug. The tools for real transformation were at our fingertips. Most of us were not coders or engineers. We didn’t have stock in tech startups nor the connections to VC firms. But we did have a voice—and people were ready to listen.
Everything that followed led us here, to an era of social media that doesn’t feel pioneering in the manner it once did. There’s still value in what’s unfolding—TikTok is creating a new visual language, and Spill’s emphasis on meme production is an attempt to occupy social exchange for a niche crowd. Coming up online today must stir thrill in the same measure it does unease. Because let’s be real: Being online is work.
Still, what’s missing from this next spin in the wheel of revolution is the adrenaline of creative invention. Bluesky is perfect for people who feel they've lost something and want it back, but platforms that find relevance solely as a means of escape, only to replicate what already exists, don’t have the weight and influence of real evolution. You could have started a group chat instead.
Updated 4/1/2024, 11:20 am EDT: This article was updated to correct the spelling of Blacksky.
