Community And Choice Are Not Bubbles

Culture

from the communities-aren't-bubbles dept

Disclosure: I am on the board of Bluesky and am inherently biased. Adjust your skepticism of what I write on this topic accordingly.

It seems a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can’t stop writing about it. Consider the curious case of Bluesky, which, according to various pundits, is a failed “liberal echo chamber” that nobody uses anymore. And yet the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle argues that “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes,” Josh Barro insists “Bluesky Isn’t a Bubble. It’s a Containment Dome,” and multiple outlets have breathlessly reported on Mark Cuban’s complaints about his personal Bluesky experience as if they were definitive proof of platform failure. Not to be left out, Slate published not one, but two separate articles complaining about Bluesky.

For a supposedly dying bubble that no one wants to use, Bluesky sure generates a lot of traffic-driving hot takes. Which suggests that maybe—just maybe—the entire premise is wrong.

The real story isn’t about Bluesky’s supposed failures—it’s about how these critiques fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media and who gets to decide what constitutes healthy discourse.

The “echo chamber” myth

Now, you might think that if everyone is complaining about “echo chambers” and “bubbles,” that there must be solid research showing that social media creates them. You would be wrong. The “echo chamber” critique of social media has been thoroughly debunked by researchers, who have consistently found the opposite to be true: people not on social media live in more sheltered information environments than those who are. Professor Michael Bang Petersen gave an interview about his research on the topic where he noted the following:

One way to think about social media in this particular regard is to turn all of our notions about social media upside down. And here I’m thinking about the notion of ‘echo chambers.’ So we’ve been talking a lot about echo chambers and how social media creates echo chambers. But, in reality, the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one that we live in in our everyday lives.

I’m a university professor. I’m not really exposed to any person who has a radically different world view or radically different life from me in my everyday life. But when I’m online, I can see all sorts of opinions that I may disagree with. And that might trigger me if I’m a hostile person and encourage me to reach out to tell these people that I think they are wrong.

But that’s because social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers. I can see the views of other people — what they are saying behind my back. That’s where a lot of the felt hostility of social media comes from. Not because they make us behave differently, but because they are exposing us to a lot of things that we’re not exposed in our everyday lives.

Power, not purity

So the “bubble” critique is empirically wrong. But even if it were right, it misses the more important point: this isn’t really about ideological diversity. It’s about who controls the microphone. When critics argue that people should have stayed on ExTwitter to “engage across difference,” they’re ignoring a fundamental reality: Elon Musk controls the algorithm and actively throttles content he dislikes. The NY Times documented how Musk minimizes the reach of those expressing views he disagrees with.

So when McArdle suggests that “liberals” made some mistake by leaving ExTwitter, she’s essentially arguing that people should willingly subject themselves to algorithmic suppression by someone who has explicitly welcomed extremist content back onto the platform. This isn’t about “engaging across difference”—it’s about accepting a rigged game where one side controls the megaphone.

Community, not performance

The “bubble” framing also fundamentally misunderstands what most people want from social media. When you go to a knitting circle, are you disappointed that most people there want to talk about knitting? When you join a book club, do you complain that everyone seems interested in books? Pundits and politicians may want to broadcast to the largest possible audience, but most people are looking for community, not maximum reach.

Most people aren’t looking for a debating arena. They want to talk with people they like about topics they care about—whether that’s knitting, local politics, or professional interests.

This becomes impossible when the platform owner has hung out a shingle for Nazis, and your attempts to discuss your hobbies get drowned out by fascist propaganda algorithmically pushed into your timeline. That’s not “diverse discourse”—it’s just a bad user experience.

Communities have social norms, which can evolve over time

Any community—online or off—develops social norms. These cultural expectations show up as “we don’t do that here” or “we encourage this behavior” signals. Critics complaining about Bluesky’s norms are often just upset that those norms don’t align with their preferences. It’s a bit like complaining that different neighborhoods have different vibes.

Yes, some users can be overly aggressive in enforcing norms, and some reactions can be trigger-happy (I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of some angry responses). But this is true of every community, online and off. If you’ve ever accidentally worn the wrong team’s jersey to a sports bar, you understand how community norms work. The difference is that Bluesky users have actual tools to address these issues themselves, rather than begging platform owners to fix things for them.

Many of the tensions critics point to aren’t unique to Bluesky—they reflect how people are processing a world where fascism is rising in America and democratic institutions are under attack. When people are dealing with existential threats, online interactions can get heated. That’s not a platform problem; it’s a human problem.

But, also, part of the benefit of a system like Bluesky is that it puts users in much greater control over their own experience, meaning they can actually take charge themselves and craft better communities around them, rather than demanding that “the company” fix things. I’m thinking of things like Blacksky, that Rudy Fraser is building. He took the initiative to build community features (custom feeds, custom labelers, etc.) catered to an audience of Black users who want tools for greater self-governance within the ATprotocol ecosystem.

User agency changes everything

This is the fundamental point that critics miss: Bluesky isn’t just another Twitter clone. It’s a demonstration of what happens when you give users actual control over their social media experience instead of forcing them to rely on the whims of billionaires.

For the past decade, social media users have been like restaurant diners who can only eat at one restaurant, where they can’t see the menu in advance, the chef changes the recipes based on his mood, and the only thing diners can do if they don’t like the menu is yell loudly and hope the chef makes something different. Bluesky is more like a food court where you can choose from multiple vendors, see what each one offers, and even set up your own stand if you want. Some people still yell loudly, but out of the learned habit that that’s the only thing you can do.

Most users don’t actually need to know about this, and they don’t need to buy into the ideology of decentralization and user empowerment, but it’s really all about giving the users more control over their social media experience whether directly on a single platform like Bluesky (with things like custom feeds, custom labelers, self-hosted data servers) or through the rapidly growing set of third-party services and apps, some of which have nothing to do with Bluesky.

This represents a fundamental shift from the past decade of social media, where users had to conform to whatever made billionaires happy (posting to the algorithm, accepting whatever content moderation decisions were made) to a system where users can customize their experience to work for them.

The “Twitter competitor” framing is the Trojan Horse. Bluesky demonstrates just one type of service that can be built on an open social protocol—but the real revolution is in returning agency to users.

That kind of user agency and control is part of what also makes some of the other complaints silly. There are better and better tools for taking control over your own experience on Bluesky, and focusing on finding your community. For example, I recently saw that there are labelers that people use to block out talk of US politics (often used by people not in the US and who don’t want to see it).

We need to unlearn the lessons many people have internalized over the past decade and a half. You shouldn’t be at the whims of any billionaire. You should chart your own course, having it set up to work for you, not the billionaire’s best interests. Critics demanding that people return to X are essentially arguing that users should give up this agency and go back to being at the mercy of Elon Musk’s mood swings and algorithmic manipulation.

That kind of user agency and control makes Elon Musk’s version of “free speech” look like what it really is: a billionaire’s right to control the conversation.

The premise is wrong

Finally, the entire premise is wrong. Anyone who actually spends time using Bluesky knows that it’s vibrant and active with a wide variety of discussion topics (and plenty of disagreements and debates, contrary to the whole “bubble” concept). It’s also well aware of what’s happening elsewhere, as there are plenty of discussions about what viewpoints are happening on the wider internet.

The idea that cultural discussions are somehow missing is ridiculous.

The data totally undermines the “dying platform no one uses” narrative: multiple media properties have noted that they get way more traffic from Bluesky than sites like Threads and ExTwitter (both of which throttle posts that include links). And a recent Pew study found that so-called “news influencers” are increasingly on Bluesky.

So we have a platform that publishers say drives more engaged traffic than the “mainstream” alternatives, where news influencers are increasingly active, and which generates enough interest that major media outlets regularly write trend pieces about it. This is not what “failure” looks like.

So basically none of the premises behind those “woe is Bluesky” articles make any sense at all.

About the only context they make sense in is as arguments from people who know they should give up on the sewage drain that ExTwitter has become, but refuse to do so. Rather than deal with their own failings, they are blaming those who have made the leap to a better place and a better system.

So, sure, some people have complaints about Bluesky. But people have complaints about any community they’re in. And Bluesky lets people have way more control over those norms and experiences than any other platform and doesn’t support fascist billionaires at the same time. And, as multiple people have already realized, embracing the Bluesky community already works much better than the billionaire-owned platforms do.

Filed Under: bubbles, community, culture, echo chambers, social media
Companies: bluesky, twitter, x