BlueSky sports take flight

Can the hottest social platform offer the functionality to feel like home?

When I got to BlueSky in 2023, I’d send up the occasional post like a lifeboat sending a desperate flare in dark skies above the ocean.

Can anybody see this?

Maybe a few hours later, I’d check again to find out. That’s a challenge when you’re trying to have a conversation about Tommy DeVito and the weirdly sluggish Giants.

The turning point came two weeks ago. With a rush of new followers thanks to Public Enemy’s Flava Flav (a sentence I never thought I would type but 18-year-old me is hyped), I finally tucked my other social media app into a folder to avoid the reflexive checking.

The party has finally come to my lifeboat.

We are in the middle of a mass-scale climate migration. Millions of people are fleeing a polluted digital environment, seeking higher ground as their homes become uninhabitable.

I have about 3,000 followers on BlueSky now compared against the roughly 40,000 I had before the site formerly known as Twitter began melting. Although it is much harder to get speculative posts on crypto currency nonsense on BlueSky, I have a functional platform again.

And here is the crazy part — the engagement I have is so much more on BlueSky despite the fraction of followers. They aren’t bots, and my posts aren’t throttled before they can reach an audience. It reminds me of the early days of Twitter in 2008, when the goal was community rather than monetization.

Ah, sweet internet nostalgia. Your elders once had to type uphill to school and back.

I didn’t pay for a verified blue check at X once they were all kidnapped, and I missed being able to engage with the people I once trusted for news. Instead, my timeline was polluted with trolling for engagement, which was a paying gig in recent years (!!), and progressively crappy ads. You used to see major corporate ad campaigns on Twitter and not just ads with a bunch of $ymbol$ in the p!tch.

I could have tolerated all of that new noise except for one thing: I no longer trusted what I read.

As millions of accounts flock to BlueSky, and the conversation turns to liberal vs. conservative echo chambers, I fear this one thing is overlooked. Yes, X owner Elon Musk’s personality is an allergen for a great number of users, but many people could have tolerated that if they could have trusted what they read. In the pre-X days, if there was a natural disaster or a conflict, real reporting from the region would be elevated. You’d hear about conditions before they reached major outlets. And while some of the early information might not be borne out, trusted voices would amplify users who seemed to have real information.

There were two hurricanes in the lead up to the election, and it was challenging to find good information in real time and, if I hadn’t been following previously verified weather and news sites, it would have been impossible.

Previously verified checks, all but gone. Block button, mangled. Two-factor identification, mostly gone. The ability to promote links, functionally smothered. When I started this substack, I had way more users arrive from BlueSky than X, despite having 32,000 more followers on X.

X had just become the swirling winds.

Now the market has identified an alternative, actually a few of them, but each has its issues. Threads is pretty upbeat but I don’t see a lot of real-time speech there — ok now that may be amended but it feels like it is under duress. Mastodon was enjoyable and had lots of scientists, but it doesn’t seem built for images and video. I tried Spoutible, too. None had the immediacy at scale to compel sports fans to pack their bags.

The Musk loyalists are welcome to their version of free speech there, a cacophony of grievances and sales pitches. The general accusations is that people are fleeing X because they can’t tolerate opposing viewpoints, but I’d assert it’s because they can’t trust what they read anymore. Is that a real person? Do they believe what they say? Or, are they posting the most extreme version for engagement.

And I could tolerated that for longer even having to switch off the “for you” tab multiple times a day. Sports fans don’t tend to argue in the way you see in other subject areas. You can’t disagree over a fundamental fact like DeVito having a 67.7 percent completion rate against the Buccaneers. You can argue about whether it matters more than team wins and losses, or some other stat, but will no will dispute that the Giants lost 30-7 with Tommy Cutlets back at quarterback.

The former Twitter still has a solid framework for live-posting and video. Remember when NFL games would play there in their entirety? And I just assumed that it would be all but impossible to pull users away from the legacy-built communities of fans. Given our inability to import followers, leaving a social media site is like moving an ocean away. You’ll make new friends, but it won’t be the same.

It has been a bit stunning to see the arrival to BlueSky of sports people I’ve followed. There’s ESPN’s Mina Kimes! And long-time Jets fan Sportsyenta! The news is arriving — new mainstream outlets are setting out a shingle every day, and it would be nice if a system of verification could be on the way as well. For everyone.

BlueSky won’t be built in a day. There is still a larger sports conversation on the old site. I’ve never minded dialog with people holding differing views, in sports we actually expect it. But removing the ability to distinguish fact from deliberate misinformation is the real issue. And management didn’t give me confidence it was going to get any better.

Does this split sports fans into factions? Is it just a few new voices or do more follow? That depends a lot on how BlueSky develops. If sports fans can get the bells and whistles they are used to, and a less noisy timeline, it should become a viable alternative.