Swifties have shown us the future of Bluesky

Swifties are moving house. After Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, successfully utilized it to help propel Trump to a second term, Swifties are abandoning the platform en masse for Bluesky. They aren’t alone—Bluesky has seen one of its largest influxes of new users in recent weeks thanks to new changes at Twitter and rampant far-right hate and harassment.

Out of all of the Twitter competitors that have popped up since Musk’s takeover, Bluesky is the one I have the most hope for. I’ve written before about how the company is attempting to meld the best bits of decentralized and centralized social networks, allowing users to have a customizable experience while still benefiting from being part of one big network.

The mass migration of the Swifties illustrates this perfectly. I was immediately impressed by the speed with which this mass of new users adopted some of Bluesky’s unique features for their own community-building purposes.

The first is Bluesky’s custom domain system for user handles. It’s a clever system that is most obviously useful for verification purposes. Bluesky’s example is NPR—their main account could be @npr.org, and journalists at NPR could be @theirname.npr.org. You immediately know those are real, official accounts—no blue check required. (Night Water is on Bluesky as @nightwater.email. Hint, hint.)

An enterprising Swiftie has utilized it for a slightly different kind of verification. Anyone who wants to can get a username on the swifties.social domain, broadcasting to everyone on the app exactly who you stan. As of publication, over 7,200 have done so.

A unique domain also makes it easy to take advantage of another unique Bluesky feature—custom feeds. I’ve written multiple times about how much I love custom feeds on Bluesky. They’re a brilliant way to break free from corporate algorithms that lead to problems like, say, the mass radicalization of young white men. The swifties.social feed pulls in every post from all 7,200+ users with a swifties.social handle. It’s an insane firehose of posts, but there’s no better way to get your finger on the pulse of the Taylor Swift fandom.

Getting a username on the swifties.social domain lets everyone know you’re a Swiftie, but how do you tell other Swifties more about you? @alice.mosphere.at has you covered with the Taylor Swift Eras labeler. Labeling services were intended as a moderation feature—it’s one of the ways, similar to custom feeds, that users can create a wholly unique feature stack within Bluesky. (There are still some kinks to work out here—there was a minor labeler implosion in June that revealed some deep issues with this approach.)

This labeler is more straightforward. You simply self-report your favorite Taylor Swift album and a label will be added to your account for everyone who subscribes to the labeler. Similar to user flair on Reddit, it’s an added bit of context that helps people communicate with each other. Another Swiftie could reply to a picture of your breakfast, and when you both realize that Speak Now is your favorite era, it could spark an online friendship for life.

Here’s the thing: these features are kind of complicated. The technical side can be tough to explain, especially when a lot of it is still in the proof-of-concept phase. Without seeing them in action, it can be tough to imagine how they’d be used or know if they’d stick.

But a community only needs a few technically-minded people to come up with creative uses for these features, and then it pays off for everybody. It’s immediately obvious to Swifties why you’d want a swifties.social handle or why you’d want to use the eras labeler. It just goes to show that if you build these flexible tools, people will use them in unexpected ways to build and find a community.

Seeing the Swifties embrace these features in such a short amount of time—it’s been less than a week since the election, mind—confirms my feeling that Bluesky is on the right path with its approach to building both this new platform and the protocol behind it.

Think about the Mastodon alternative: a Swiftie would have to set up and host a full Swifties server, pay for thousands of people to use it (expensive), and successfully moderate it themselves or with a small team of volunteers. And if that gets to be too much and they want to stop, the whole thing goes away—the server, the accounts, and the community. Not so with Bluesky—these individual features are much cheaper to run, and if they ever stop working, everyone still has their accounts. (The Threads alternative is an even shorter story: literally none of this is possible, plus you’re on Threads, one of the most miserable places on the internet.)

The Swifties have taken over Bluesky. They may have been the first mass migration to show us how powerful Bluesky’s features can be for building community, but they won’t be the last.

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