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If you’re familiar with Bluesky, the upstart social media platform vying to replace X/Twitter, you might be aware that it hasn’t always been synonymous with sports.

For a while, in fact, there was a stretch when the sheer lack of sports talk on it was something of a running gag on the platform. Paul Frazee, one of Bluesky’s developers, even referenced this in February when he jokingly posted “Welcome to the world’s top social network for Sports.”

But all of that has changed in a big way rather quickly. Bluesky suddenly feels like it really does have a legitimate, sustainable sports community on it that’s only going to continue to grow, which is why it’s worth it to assess what progress it’s been making and where the app is poised to be in the future.

It’s pretty remarkable how much Bluesky has exploded in the last couple of months, with its user base now above 25 million people. Major brands like ESPN and The Athletic, who for over a year had no presence on it whatsoever, are suddenly using it, as are prominent sports journalists like Chris Haynes, Ian Rapoport, and Ken Rosenthal.

Officially official.

My first @bsky.app post.

— Ian Rapoport (@rapsheet1.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 9:42 AM

Major personalities like Mina Kimes, Mark Cuban, Ben Stiller, and Zach Lowe are posting frequently on it too, while sports teams like the Trail Blazers, Mets, Pirates, Royals, and Aces are now providing the same team updates on it that they post on X.

Bluesky, which for over a year was actively avoided by many sports fans because of its dearth of sports discussions, is now a place where you can get all your necessary sports news while hearing from a majority of the big-name sports writers. It’s a platform you can be on without feeling like you’re actually missing out on anything essential sports-wise, except getting to interact with the specific holdouts who refuse to budge from X.

The reason for Bluesky’s rapid explosion is largely due to people getting fed up with X – which continues to deteriorate and recently went as far as to neuter its block button. It helps too that Threads, the other prominent player in the microblogging game, is so functionally unintuitive and so consumed in a culture of vapid engagement posting that it’s frankly unimaginable that it could ever catch X, which leaves the door open for Bluesky – with a UI that’s practically identical to X’s – to be the natural heir apparent to it.

Indeed, for as slow as Bluesky was to implement certain features, what’s kept it viable this whole time is that it’s the only Twitter rival that truly understands how to capture the essence of what made Twitter appealing back when it was actually Twitter.

It helps, though, that Bluesky has added the critical features necessary for sports fans to transition to it. The app no longer requires an invite code to join, direct messaging has been incorporated, and video uploading – the linchpin to any thriving sports community – has at last arrived, which is beyond important because, without the ability to scroll through highlights, the recent growth the platform has seen in the sports section simply would not exist.

There are a few features that still need to be added though, particularly group DMs and the ability to upload longer videos at a higher resolution (at the moment videos can only be 60 seconds long and you can’t post more than 25 a day). A verification checkmark system is also going to be a must one day, because while the platform does allow domain handles – which are helpful for brands like ESPN and the Mets to prove that they’re legit – it leaves individual people of note who aren’t maintaining their own personal website (which is virtually all of them) to have to fend for themselves in the honor system, something that’s tolerable for now but won’t be sustainable in the long run given sports fans’ penchant for trying to invent fake news headlines.

Even with some improvements to be made, which are ultimately understandable given how new the platform is, more than enough of the boxes are checked for someone who wants to escape X to settle on Bluesky if they want to. And people should want to escape X for Bluesky.

The thing that makes Bluesky so appealing, even with its current limitations, is that it is a substantially healthier place to be to talk about sports than X. You can scroll through your timeline and not encounter a single ad (unlike X, which won’t even let you watch two-second videos anymore without attaching an ad to the back of them). You can post things and not be deluged with porn spambots beckoning you to check out their you-know in bio. You can check your DMs and not have to sift through spam for bots shrieking fake job offers at you. You can get a notification and not have to brace yourself for the possibility that it’s something unnaturally unpleasant you have to deal with. You can browse the app and not have to worry about encountering massive, explicitly racist, sexist, or homophobic accounts – as opposed to X, which features users like “Gentile News Network” and “Garbage24” who are so proudly bigoted that they regularly share posts with the n-word and other slurs and yet have hundreds of thousands of followers and are under no threat of ever being suspended.

Mina Kimes on the migration from X to Bluesky: “We are conflating egregious racism and misogyny with diversity of thought, or with reasonable opinion and disagreements.”

http://dlvr.it/TGM3pm

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— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) November 23, 2024 at 8:41 PM

It isn’t until you actually use Bluesky for a bit and detox yourself from X that you can truly appreciate what a horrid little hellhole that app has become for sports. It isn’t just that X’s user base has become notably meaner and toxic, in no small part due to the unseemly corners of the site gradually creeping into its sports community. It’s that buying a blue check on X gives you so much visibility that the discourse on the platform is now regularly dominated by people pushing engagement bait – people who in a pre-Elon world would have been totally irrelevant.

Plagiaristic aggregator accounts, which on NBA Twitter have grown so legion that one account, NBA Central, has nearly 2 million followers, flood the conversation by boosting gossipy, trashy drivel to pad out their timeline so that they come off as a constant source of news. NBA Central, for example, has tweeted a staggering 78 news items this year about Shaq and the things he’s said on his otherwise unimportant podcast.

LegionHoops, another of the biggest NBA aggregator accounts, has tweeted 45 news items this year just about Paul Pierce, with almost all of them being about things he’s said. The circulation of posts like this has not only resulted in the app being drowned in constant bickering and arguing, as almost all of those shared items are intensely negative but it’s had the trickle-down effect of inspiring countless other gimmick accounts and aggregators to form as well, who no doubt noticed how quickly you can elevate yourself by being formulaic.

The sports community on X is now dominated by lazy, engagement-seeking, overly blue-check users who purposefully post inflammatory garbage for the sole purpose of profiting off of it. It’s so incredibly easy to rise as a hater account on X that some of the largest ones aren’t even run by adults. “Hater Central”, one of the endless array of gimmick accounts that piles on athletes whenever they have a bad game, was started by a literal 16-year-old. It now has 132,000 followers in only a couple of years.

On Bluesky, none of that is the case. There is no profit incentive for posting on it, and as such, the people who post about sports on it only do so because they actually like them. Which is the way it should be!

It’s honestly incredible how much more pleasant it is to talk about sports on Bluesky compared to X, where the user experience can best be described as a miserable slog. There are no prominent aggregator accounts on Bluesky, no prominent stan accounts, no prominent Muse accounts, no prominent accounts dedicated to joylessly ripping apart athletes whenever they have an off night, and no prominent sports accounts boosting sentiments that are offensive or hateful.

Conversations on it feel natural and aren’t being dictated for the sake of engagement, while the biggest accounts on it are prominent journalists and writers as opposed to people who more or less bought their way into having a big account as is the case with X.

is this thing on?

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— ESPN (@espn.com) December 6, 2024 at 4:36 PM

The sports community on Bluesky is only a fraction as large as the one on X, which is of course the biggest factor in why people remain on it; people are on X because they’ve always been there, and when they drift back to it it’s to converse with the people who are there who aren’t in a hurry to leave.

But anyone who’s seen enshittification in action knows that X is not only going to keep getting worse, it’s going to keep getting worse until it shrivels up and dies one day. And when that inevitably happens, Bluesky is not only in an excellent position to inherit its user base, but it’s already a far better experience than it even without that happening.

How much of a sure thing Bluesky is is impossible to say. If people are reluctant to join Bluesky, it’s because they’re reluctant to trust any tech company anymore, and are so inclined to avoid the constant merry-go-round of platform jumping that they’re resigned to simply staying on X until it sinks into the sea.

But I’m willing to put my faith in Bluesky even if I have some concerns with it. I think the platform needs to be more aggressive in suspending inciting, bad-faith agitator accounts, for one. For another, I worry about the possibility of its upcoming premium service in any way compensating or rewarding users for purchasing it, as doing so could lead to some of the same havoc that X Premium (AKA Twitter Blue) wrought on X.

And yet, despite all that, its leaders seem earnest to me and sincerely interested in making a great product, and the app they’ve built, I believe, will one day wind up being a better and healthier home for sports than Twitter ever was.

Sports Bluesky is very much a thing. How much of a thing it will be will depend on any number of factors, but for now, if you’re looking for a place to follow sports that won’t rot your brain as much as X does, it is absolutely worth giving it a try.

The author of this piece can be found at velodus.bsky.social