Bluesky has the chattering class, but what about normal people?

• Bluesky says it now has about 20 million users and has become quite a vibrant site.
• There are a lot of experts and people talking about the elections, but are there enough ordinary people?
• There’s a hero we need: Pop Crave.

Bluesky has experienced explosive growth in recent weeks, reaching 20 million users. Since the election, it has gone from a sleepy niche app to a vibrant destination that resembles pre-Muskian Twitter.

There are many Twitter refugees who found X to be a hostile user experience for various reasons. There are plenty of obvious reasons for this: the owner’s own posts constantly being pushed to the top of the platform, low-quality viral videos clogging people’s feeds, the constant spam in DMs, and the change in terms of service of X that makes it possible to train AI on your tweets. And then some people simply decided that after Elon Musk’s role in the elections and as Donald Trump’s first buddy, they didn’t want anything to do with X anymore.

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 now is a bunch of new users, mostly of one type: the brainiac set. Max Read described this new user base very well on his Substack:

As far as I can tell, the users who have joined Bluesky in droves lately are members of the big blob of liberal-to-left journalists, academics, lawyers, and tech workers—politically engaged email job types—who first adopted Twitter and whose compulsive use of the site over the years was a major factor in shaping its culture and norms. (Some of these users have been on the site for a while and are valiantly trying to change Bluesky’s culture from “toxically crazy” to “moderately crazy.”)

I don’t want to underestimate the importance of this group defecting to Bluesky. These are people with an absolute, almost pathological dedication to producing free content for short message 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 caustic quote tweets at scale is unparalleled, even if the biting quote tweets are only funny two times out of seven.

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

Read points out that while this cohort of users is valuable if you want a feed full of new content, it’s not all you need. You also need “normies” or “locals”: people who like and repost jokes that you (an experienced Business Insider reader) might think aren’t too funny or interesting. You need teenagers. You need people who don’t want journalists discussing Trump’s cabinet appointments with other journalists (even I don’t want that). You need people who aren’t the kind of people who take a vocal moral stance on the use of X or know what the intention is federal is.

Right now, in my experience, Bluesky still lacks that basic layer of regular people. You need those standards – you can’t have a functioning city that’s all hip in Bushwick, Brooklyn – you also need boring Midtown Manhattan and families in Forest Hills, Queens.

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

I found myself missing an important account from X – something I relied on for breaking news and also some relief from serious discussions. I needed candy. I needed something like Pop Crave.

Bluesky doesn’t have verification in the same way as on its website and has not answered 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 are on Bluesky – they said they signed up in 2022 but only started posting regularly in the past few weeks. Thank God. Once I saw the famous post “Olivia Rodrigo Stuns in New Photo,” I knew this place in Bluesky might have a chance.