Editor’s Note: The author of this piece can be reached on Bluesky @velodus.bsky.social
If you’re a sports fan who regularly uses Twitter, it’s probably time to start paying attention to Bluesky Social. The app, which was initially spun off of Twitter by Jack Dorsey and is now run by Jay Graber, launched as an invite-only beta application earlier in the year and has taken off to a degree that no other Twitter upstart has. 80,000 people have already joined and almost two million people are on its waitlist, which alone would make it substantially more popular in its infancy than Mastodon, Cohost, Hive Social, Spoutible, Substack Notes and every other Twitter clone that’s vied for attention in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Bluesky has gotten so much attention so quickly that prominent figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jake Tapper, LeVar Burton, Jimmy Fallon, Patton Oswalt and Andy Richter have started using it, while invites for it have become so coveted that they regularly sell for triple-figures on eBay.
All of which begs an important question: What are the odds that Bluesky could actually dethrone Twitter and how likely is it that sports fans could soon be following games on it like they have been on Twitter for over a decade and a half? Is “Sports Bluesky” going to be the next Sports Twitter? The answer, in my opinion, is a solid maybe. But that doesn’t mean the people running Bluesky won’t have to work to make it a reality.
There are two major factors working in Bluesky’s advantage, beyond that it’s quickly establishing itself as the first legitimate “next Twitter.” The first, quite simply, is that its interface looks and operates just like Twitter’s. Using it feels natural and intuitive and smooth in a way that no other Twitter clone has frankly come close to. There’s no learning curve to it and it doesn’t demand an intimidating amount of technical knowhow like other decentralized platforms such as Mastodon do. This makes it a very appealing landing spot for users who’d like to continue the basic experience of using Twitter but without actually being on it. Additionally, Bluesky is the only Twitter clone that has retained both a character count and an inability to edit posts, aspects that may seem semantic or unnecessary to some but are essential in order to retain the core, rapidfire basis of Twitter’s appeal.
The other major factor is that Twitter itself seems like it’s both literally and figuratively falling apart at the seams. Twitter has always been something of a guilty pleasure, but it honestly feels gross to use it now thanks to Elon’s inescapable thumbprint, which has resulted in the site becoming more and more dominated by racist users, spambots, pornbots and embarrassing, unavoidable advertisements from the few remaining companies willing to sponsor it. The site just isn’t fun to use anymore; everyday it feels like more and more of what made it special is being ripped apart from it for no reason whatsoever. Users are exhausted with Elon, who every day manages to answer the question: “What if the world’s richest person was also the world’s most annoying, pathetic, insufferable loser?”, and however glued they are to the platform, people are also itching to exercise this manchild and his whims out of their life for good. When Bluesky finally goes public, it’s not hard to envision a potential mass exodus for it that could eventually spell the end of Twitter as anything more than an 8chan-like sewer.
That said, here’s the rub with Bluesky: it’s not even close to being ready. As of mid-May 2023, the app lacks video functionality, gif functionality, direct messaging, drafts, lists (other than for muting people), hashtags, an ability to hide reposts (their equivalent of retweets), an ability to see quote posts (their equivalent of quote tweets), an ability to hide replies in the timeline, an ability to highlight text, and in-app language translator, an in-app poll system, a threaded reply system that doesn’t look weird, bookmarks, a search function that isn’t terrible, and anything even resembling a news interface.
This is critical because while merely being a Twitter-like app minus the baggage is going to be good enough for a lot of users to switch over to it, that’s not going to be true at all for people who use Twitter to follow sports. Sports Twitter is a very unique sector of it, in that people aren’t so much using it as a discussion board as much as they’re using it to follow live events through the app itself. Sports Twitter is a place where you can get news, watch highlights and enjoy people’s commentary all in real time. It is many people’s primary sports hub and even as Twitter circles the drain and gets worse and worse each day, getting sports fans to permanently abandon it isn’t going to be easy.
For Sports Bluesky to ever be a thing, it needs to be as good as if not better than Twitter in all the ways it’s able to deliver content to users – especially in the video department. In lieu of those features, most people who are addicted to Sports Twitter – even if they like Bluesky or find it interesting – are nonetheless going to remain on Twitter specifically to consume sports on it with the people they know until the bitter end, because as horrible as Twitter’s become, it’s still an objectively better platform for sports than Bluesky is right now. It’s for this reason that for all the momentum Bluesky has, there’s almost no sports presence on it whatsoever, to the extent that almost every sports account on there (there’s not many) has literally, at one point, remarked about how devoid the app is of sports interest.
Major sports Twitter accounts have been resistant to start regularly posting on Bluesky, even once they’ve gotten an invite. I was blessed with a decent amount of invites not long ago, which I then sent out to a number of high profile Sports Twitter users, and I found it notable how hard it was to find sports people who actually wanted to use it right now. Most Twitter users would leap at a chance to get into Bluesky, but among big sports accounts on Twitter, I found a palpable amount of ambivalence. To most denizens of Sports Twitter, Bluesky is only a curiosity right now, if not perhaps an investment for the future. It hasn’t in any way distinguished itself as being any more of a sports hub than Mastodon or Hive or Cohost was, which is why of the few sports people who are on Bluesky right now, virtually all of them are still primarily using Twitter to keep up with sports.
This could change in time as the platform improves, but it illustrates that for all the juice Bluesky might have, its success is not inevitable and there’s not at all a guarantee that it will automatically inherit the Sports Twitter community even if the platform as a whole were to overtake Twitter. Being the closest parallel to Twitter isn’t enough; users are not going to regularly use Bluesky for sports if the product is still inferior to something they can get elsewhere. How well videos will function on it, in particular, is something I believe will make or break how much of a sports community is able to bloom on it. If it were to eventually have an autoplay video component that’s as good as Twitter’s, it could absolutely take off. If it doesn’t, it’s entirely possible that users could split off to seek a better sports replacement elsewhere, at Discord for instance.
Still, I find myself very encouraged with Bluesky after using it for a few weeks and have come to believe that it likely is going to replace Twitter at some point, which may continue in a zombified state ala Myspace but which I otherwise expect to die in the not-too-distant future from the weight of self-destructive inertia that’s been heaped upon it.
If you’re a regular Sports Twitter user, that doesn’t mean you have to start packing your bags or start clawing for the nearest Bluesky invite. Given that Sports Bluesky likely wouldn’t begin to become a thing until the app goes public and given how many features still need to be added to it, it might be a bit before Twitter users who use it primarily for sports will have a reason to need to be on Bluesky. That said, I do think Bluesky poses a serious enough threat to Twitter that it’s worth paying attention to. It may not be much of a haven for sports content right now (to put it mildly), but we might only be a few months away from that changing in a very big way. And if that happens, Bluesky has the potential to go from a place where sports talk doesn’t exist to one that, like Twitter… for now, is synonymous with it.
