Bluesky Isn't a Bubble. It's a Containment Dome.

Pray that Bluesky doesn't die entirely — we need it so the worst liberal posts are kept in a place where the broader public won't ever see them.

Dear readers,

My friend Megan McArdle warns in a column that the social media platform Bluesky is a harmful bubble for liberals. By decamping together for Bluesky, she writes, liberals have cloistered themselves in a place where their views won’t be challenged. And because the conversational norms on Bluesky are so hostile and obnoxious — do you ever use AI? Former “Reply All” host Alex Goldman wants you to know you should be thrown into a volcano — the platform fails to appeal beyond its niche political audience, is losing users, and is unlikely to become a place where posting is a good way to influence public opinion.

Megan correctly describes these dynamics, but she’s wrong about them being harmful. In fact, these dynamics are why Bluesky is an important harm reduction tool for liberals. Twitter used to be a place where the most neurotic and censorious liberal influencers were highly effective at influencing events within media organizations and the Democratic Party. But was that actually ever good for liberal causes?

Megan writes about the Before Time:

Progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them. Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later.

A lot of the blame for the self-inflicted wounds of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary should go to The Groups: it was the ACLU that got Kamala Harris to commit to taxpayer-funded sex changes for criminals and detained migrants. But one of the reasons Democrats didn’t realize it was a big mistake to make promises and statements that made them sound wacky was that they were constantly being yelled at on Twitter by people whose unpopular viewpoints they mistook for broad public opinion.¹ The screamers won the battle but they lost the war: they pressured their own candidates into manufacturing attack ad fodder for Republicans, and as a result, Donald Trump is president again.

Image generation by ChatGPT — don’t tell Alex Goldman.

There is much to regret about the ways Elon Musk has changed Twitter. But there’s been one obvious change for the better: By rupturing the Twitter user base, he (accidentally?) created a firewall between the most maladjusted liberal posters on the internet and the reporters, Democratic politicians and operatives who used to pay an excessive amount of attention to their harangues. (Media reporter Max Tani wrote about this for Semafor last month: “I spoke with a few congressional staffers who said that they had tried using Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, but they gave up after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.”) I believe the emergence of this firewall is one reason for the renaissance that we were seeing at WelcomeFest last week: Democrats are becoming more cognizant of public opinion and less fearful of breaking with the activist base because they are no longer receiving so much activist messaging in the form of aggrieved Twitter push alerts on their phones.

The problem with a “bubble” is that it prevents the people inside from accessing the information on the outside. But the core functionality of Bluesky is not that it keeps information out; it’s that it keeps information in. Like the containment dome over a nuclear reactor, Bluesky serves the important safety purpose of ensuring that whatever meltdowns occur within produce minimal fallout. So while I’m not on Bluesky, I value the platform, and I encourage its users to continue screaming at each other about how much the rest of us all suck. Please do not leave.

Very seriously,

Josh

P.S. By the way, I wrote for the New York Times today about Trump’s One, Big Beautiful Bill, and how nearly all of its program spending cuts are likely to be offset by higher interest expense due to bigger deficits and higher interest rates. So, millions of people will be thrown off Medicaid, but the burden of government spending will barely fall, and mortgage rates will be higher. It sucks!

P.P.S. We’re going to be bringing back an edition of the Mayonnaise Clinic. Could you use my advice on travel, hosting, or other summer activities? Would you like me to settle an argument? Write in: mayo@joshbarro.com.

1. The Twitter screamers also impaired Democrats’ ability to realize they were holding on to COVID restrictions for too long — Taylor Lorenz is still yelling into the void about it, but circa 2022, many liberals took her seriously.