Bluesky has ‘the juice’ — but it still doesn’t have the normies

Bluesky now has 20 million users.

Bluesky has seen explosive growth in the last few weeks — hitting 20 million users. Since the election, it’s gone from a sleepy niche app to a bustling destination that resembles pre-Muskian Twitter.

It has a lot of Twitter refugees who, for various reasons, had found X a hostile user experience. There are plenty of obvious reasons for that: the owner’s own posts being continually pushed to the top of the platform, low-quality viral videos clogging people’s feeds, the constant spam in DMs, and the change in X’s terms of service that allows it to train AI on your tweets. And then some people simply decided that after Elon Musk’s role in the election and as first buddy of Donald Trump, they no longer wanted anything to do with X.

What made Twitter so Twitter-y in its prime was a certain mix of users — brainiacs and wannabe brainiacs, but also normal people. What Bluesky has right now is a ton of new users, mostly of a certain type — the brainiac set. Max Read, on his Substack, described this new user base very well:

From what I can tell, the users who’ve been joining Bluesky en masse recently are members of the big blob of liberal-to-left-wing journalists, academics, lawyers, and tech workers–politically engaged email-job types–who were early Twitter adopters and whose compulsive use of the site over the years was an important force in shaping its culture and norms. (Some of those users have been on the site for a while, valiantly attempting to change Bluesky’s culture from “toxically wack” to “tolerably wack.”)

I don’t want to understate the importance of this group’s defection to Bluesky. These are people with an absolute, almost pathological commitment to producing free content for short-form posting websites; they make up a significant portion of the legendary “Tweeting Tenth”–the 10 percent of Twitter users who at one point created 90 percent of the site’s activity–and their ability to generate mordant quote-tweets at scale is unmatched, even if the mordant quote-tweets are only funny, like, two times out of seven.

This group — people who post a lot, in real time, is what some people are calling “the juice” — the sign of an active platform.

Read points out that while this cohort of users is valuable if you want to have a feed full of fresh content, it’s not all you need. You also need “normies” or “locals” — people who like and repost jokes that you (a sophisticated reader of B-17) might think are not too funny or interesting. You need teens. You need people who do not want to hear journalists discuss the Trump cabinet appointments with other journalists (not even I want that). You need people who aren’t the kind of people who might take a loud moral stance about using X or know what the fediverse is.

Right now, in my experience, Bluesky is still missing that base layer of regular people. You need those normies — you can’t have a functioning city that’s entirely hip Bushwick, Brooklyn — you also need boring Midtown Manhattan and families in Forest Hills, Queens.

I had found myself struggling to enjoy Bluesky — too many journalists, too many people talking politics, too many people talking about Bluesky (yes, I am aware that I am committing the crime of all three of those things right now). What was great about old Twitter was the high-low mix: seeing a serious pundit’s tweet right next to a dirty joke or something from the Sabrina Carpenter stan army.

I found myself missing a key account from X — something I relied on for breaking news and also some relief from serious discussion. I needed confection. I needed something like Pop Crave.

Bluesky doesn’t have verification in the same way X or Threads does, and it doesn’t appear that there’s an official Pop Crave account (there are some knockoff versions or something that appears to be an automated version — Pop Crave doesn’t list a Bluesky account on its website and didn’t answer questions about whether it has a real account).

However, there is a Pop Base account — a competitor to Pop Crave. Pop Base confirmed to me that they’re on Bluesky — they said they joined in 2022 but only started posting regularly in the last few weeks. Thank God. Once I saw a familiar “Olivia Rodrigo stuns in new photo” post, I knew maybe — just maybe — this Bluesky place had a chance.