Bluesky is a record store

Eighteen months ago, the metaphor I was using for Bluesky was that it was the Ship of Theseus. This was during the post-election haze, when people were abandoning Twitter X in droves, and turning to Bluesky. Piece by piece, all the parts of old-Twitter that people actually liked were being reassembled on Bluesky.

I still think there’s something to that. It is conceptually pretty fascinating that Bluesky works at all. As I mentioned in the kicker of that piece, “Seventeen years of network effects should, in theory, have been an insurmountable advantage. But network effects and habitual user behavior have proven no match for the strongest repulsive forces in the known universe: Elon Musk’s personality.”

But it’s also true that the Bluesky migration was incomplete. Last month, in a post titled “Is Bluesky dying,” James Ball sounded an alarm, pointing out that daily activity has fallen substantially over the past year. Earlier this week, David Roberts made a similar point, noting the net-negative effect of politicians and media institutions remaining on X and being dragged further right.

I don’t think Bluesky is dying, per se. But I do think we’ve seen in the past year that Bluesky is quite niche. My initial response to Ball’s argument was “The entire web is dying. Users aren’t going from BlueSky to another site (x/insta/threada/tiktok). Users are going to chatbots.”

Petter Törnberg has since published a paper in JQD that fills in the picture with relevant data. Social media engagement is down everywhere. We don’t know for sure that they’ve turned to chatbots. But it’s pretty clear that people aren’t leaving the progressive text-based social media network for an alternative text-based social media network.

That doesn’t mean Bluesky is going to die. But it does mean that the site isn’t ever going to replace peak-Twitter. Nothing will.

II think it’s helpful to introduce another metaphor. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced that Bluesky is a record store.

Record stores were once an essential part of the music industry’s attention economy. In the 1990s, you could access music through (1) the radio, (2) MTV, and (3) the record store. The record store was arguably the most important of the three, because it was the only point-of-sale location. Record stores were pretty big businesses (remember Tower Records?) and cultural institutions (Empire Records, High Fidelity).

Then came iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon.

Record stores still exist in 2026. Some of them even thrive. People like me like record stores. They remain active, niche cultural institutions. But they are distinctly different entities than they were in their heyday. They have a smaller footprint, and they operate within those limitations.

The same is true for text-based social media platforms. The era of peak social media is over. Twitter and Facebook used to be the “attention backbone” of the entire internet. (Ben Smith’s book, Traffic, is probably the best discussion of how media worked in this time period.)

People like me also like Bluesky. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that people who like record stores all pretty much like Bluesky. And that’s probably the right frame of mind for thinking about text-based social media in general. It isn’t a dominant media institution anymore. It’s niche. It has some cultural cachet, but you will be disappointed if you expect it to recapture the glory days.

The mid-2020s is an awkward time to have launched a text-based social media network, in much the same way that it is an awkward time to open up a new record store. This isn’t exactly the future anymore, y’know?

And/but, I think one reason why people keep having existential debates about the present and future of a niche social media network is that there are two types of deep uncertainty about what the future will look like.

(1) There’s AI-uncertainty: social media doesn’t drive web traffic anymore. Nothing seems to have replaced it. That’s, y’know, bad. There’s a giant hole at the center of the attention economy, and it’s getting bigger, and everyone is vaguely nervous about it.

(2) Then there’s authoritarian uncertainty: As David Roberts pointed out, all of our mainstream institutions are sprinting to the right. Everything is bad and depressing. Everything is falling apart. It sure would be nice if the spaces where we congregate online felt as vibrant and productive as they used to.

All that uncertainty is real, and worth dwelling upon. But I think it’s helpful to calibrate our expectations. Bluesky isn’t dying, but it is attempting to thrive within a declining niche. Bluesky isn’t the reason why mainstream institutions are galloping to the right, but it is less useful as a space for effective counter-mobilization than it would have been, back when text-based social media was the backbone of the entire attention economy.

I’m going to happily keep posting my little jokes and rants and book reviews on Bluesky. It’s a nice distraction, and purpose-built for people-like-me. But most of my students will probably never get into it… and the ones who do will probably be the ones who hang out at record stores.

Meanwhile, the hole at the center of the attention economy keeps expanding, and the fascist overlords get ever more brazen, and everyone tries to figure out what we can do about those twin crises.

I’m not sure how we solve them. But I don’t believe these are record store-shaped problems.