Why #TechTwitter's Bluesky experiment failed 🤦‍♀️

Why did Bluesky fail?

At its heart, Twitter thrives on immediacy. A hot take, a clever meme, or a breaking news thread could generate dozens of replies within minutes.

That rapid feedback loop created the sense of community that made TechTwitter addictive. Bluesky, however, has struggled to replicate that rhythm.

Posts often feel like shouts into the void, with little conversation bouncing back. In Bluesky’s Java community, there’s very little interaction.

Comments on posts are rare, few ‘skeets’ get many likes and it’s a struggle to get a repost, regardless of whether you have 100 followers or 100,000.

Without the critical mass of replies, retweets, and comment threads, users drift into passivity.

Interactivity isn’t just a feature of social media, it’s the lifeblood. Without it, the platform feels static, and it’s certainly something Bluesky lacks.

Bluesky has turned into a real disappointment.

Social media needs to be ‘social’

Take David Shiffman’s Bluesky account, for example.

A recent article on Arstechnica titled “Bluesky now platform of choice for science community” is emblematic of the type of hype Bluesky continues to get, as detractors continue to hope it will dethrone Twitter/X as the king of microblogging media sites.

The article focuses on the apparent success marine biologist David Shiffman, an early Bluesky adopter, has experienced.

Yet when you scan through his Bluesky profile, you see everything that’s wrong with the platform.

Even with 100K followers, politically-neutral posts rarely get comments, they struggle to get likes and you only ever see them occasionally retweeted.

A social media platform simply can’t thrive if the participants on it refuse to be ‘social.’

Even with 100K followers, comments on politically-neutral Bluesky posts are rare.

Politics Alone Can’t Unite a Community

Part of the early migration to Bluesky was fueled by what many people saw as the politicization of Twitter, as the new ownership encouraged free speech and ended the promotion of progressive ideals. Many people simply wanted to escape the political firehose that ensued.

But disliking something is not the same as being united by shared purpose.

A platform cannot thrive on collective dislike alone. In fact, the lack of a unifying, positive theme left Bluesky feeling fragmented.

Unlike TechTwitter, which bonded around startups, coding puzzles, and insider banter, the tech community on Bluesky lacked any clear cultural nucleus other than a strong lean towards the political left.

Truth Social for the left

What’s more, the Bluesky community’s left-leaning voices quickly became all of the things they purportedly detested about the right.

Dog whistles for violence, or even outright calls for violent action against the democratically elected Trump regime became commonplace, and when they did occur, there was never a level-headed voice to object and say “hey, we actually think assassination attempts and calls for political violence are wrong.”

Bluesky social quickly became “Truth Social for the left,” where all of the most detestable behaviors and beliefs of the January 6th crowd have become acceptable and encouraged, so long as they target detested political elites.

It’s a terrible display of both violent hostility and inexcusable hypocrisy.

Bluesky quickly became ‘Truth Social for the lunatic-left,’ where calls for political violence are commonplace and rarely challenged by the echo-chamber.

The “take my ball and leaving” mentality

The move to Bluesky mirrored a playground scenario with one side taking its ball and starting a new game elsewhere. But what happens when the energy of the original playground doesn’t follow?

That’s what Bluesky revealed.

Many early adopters brought over their old frustrations but left behind the vibrancy that made Twitter compelling. Without the push-and-pull of opposing viewpoints, or the sheer chaos of mass participation, the new game never really took off.

And what’s more, the selfish ‘take-my-ball-and-go-home’ attitude of many #TechTwitter personalities who migrated to Bluesky created a community skewed towards self-interest and away from generosity and sharing.

That’s why we constantly see Bluesky users posting links to their own talks or their latest blogs, but rarely interacting with others, seldom retweeting posts from other accounts and never giving out a like.

Bluesky lacks the ‘social’ element of ‘social media.’

Lacking the courage of their convictions

Perhaps most tellingly, a number of prominent voices who loudly announced they were leaving Twitter forever, citing ethical objections and a desire to take an important moral stand, quietly drifted back.

That return revealed something critical, that the gravitational pull of Twitter’s interactivity and influence outweighed the moral grandstanding.

This back-and-forth not only undermined Bluesky’s credibility but also sapped its momentum. If even the noble tech-leaders in their moral fight against closet-Nazis and fascists dictators couldn’t stay away, how could they expect a broader community to stick it out?

For example, Sharat Chander, a left-leaning gatekeeper in the Java community, well known for his dog-whistles for political violence and the speed for which he labels anyone who disagrees with his views a ‘fascist’, made great fanfare out of his moral and ethical move away from Twitter.

“I’ve taken my S***ter account private, and deleted Instagram/Threads. I’ll only be posting here moving forward,” skeeted Chander on Bluesky last January.

Yet only a few months after announcing his bold, political stand, Sharat’s back on Threads, uploading to an IG account that was never deleted and posting more prolifically on Twitter/X than ever.

For many Democrats who ‘permanently switched’ to Bluesky after the Harris election loss, the comments, likes and shares Twitter/X gave them are clearly more important than their integrity.

Rarely did any of the moral and ethical stands against Musk, Trump, Nazis, fascism and the X platform last very long.

The Algorithm problem and the Pareto effect

Bluesky’s decision to avoid algorithmic curation, framed as a virtue, also exposed a structural weakness.

Without the recommendation engines that drive Twitter or TikTok, Bluesky naturally gravitates toward the Pareto principle, where a small minority of accounts dominate the attention and interactions, while the vast majority remain largely invisible. Instead of fostering a broad, dynamic community, the platform entrenches an oligarchy of influencers.

Ironically, many of the progressive voices who left Twitter to escape perceived imbalances of power in political and media landscapes now find themselves living under a digital version of the same hierarchy. The result is a platform that reproduces the very political theatre its users claimed they wanted to escape.

An older, quieter demographic

Another striking dynamic is demographic. Bluesky has skewed older, especially among tech professionals.

While that group brings experience and credibility, it also brings a more subdued energy. The lively, irreverent back-and-forth that gave TechTwitter its distinctive spark is less common. Instead, timelines often feel like conference hallways.

Without younger voices adding memes, jokes, and wild experiments, Bluesky feels like a quieter, more sterile echo of what came before.

Self-promotion over spontaneity

Finally, the culture that has taken hold on Bluesky leans heavily toward self-promotion. Users share links to their talks, their latest articles, or their new books.

While this is valuable in moderation, it lacks spontaneity. The infectious energy of TechTwitter came from tangents, debates, and in-jokes that spiraled out of control. Bluesky, by contrast, feels more like a professional bulletin board.

Information flows, but excitement doesn’t.

The lesson of Bluesky’s failure

Bluesky’s failure to capture TechTwitter’s magic highlights the simple truth that you can’t rebuild a community simply by escaping the old one.

Social platforms thrive when users feel connected, challenged, and energized. Without interactivity, shared culture, and a spark of unpredictability, even the best-designed alternatives will struggle to generate true enthusiasm.

And when the loudest defectors can’t resist returning to the platform they denounced, while those who stayed face an oligarchic landscape of uninspired influencers, it becomes clear that Bluesky didn’t just fail to replace Twitter, but it failed to become anything more than a boring, thinner echo of it.

Darcy DeClute is a Certified Cloud Practitioner and author of the Scrum Master Certification Guide. Popular both on Udemy and social media, Darcy’s @Scrumtuous account has well over 250K followers on Twitter/X. She’s also on YouTube, Bluesky and TikTok.