alt Hacker NewsPeople say BlueSky is like pre-Musk Twitter, i.e. leftist opinions in today’s Twitter style.
Which is a bit strange because BlueSky is supposed to be decentralized (no central moderation); and although in practice it’s not, the BlueSky team seems pro-freedom (see: Jesse Signal controversy). I know there are some rightists (including the White House), but are they a decent presence? Are they censored? Are there other groups (e.g. “sophisticated” politics, fringe politics, art, science)?
Mastodon is interesting. Its format is like Twitter, but most posts seem less political and less LCD-CW (e.g. types.pl, Mathstodon). I suspect because it’s actually decentralized (IIRC Truth Social is a fork; I didn’t write all posts are less CW). I’m curious to find other interesting instances here too.
Pre-Musk, I remember seeing screenshots of the stupidest, most echo-chamber-y Tweets imaginable. e.g. “why do the cows all have female names, that’s misogynistic” (that one was deliberate satire but I’m sure most were). I’ll brag, I left around 2013 because I felt it was rotting my brain. I enjoyed a few more years off social media, with a healthy dopamine system. Unfortunately, now I’m here.
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I think it would be more accurate to say that Bluesky is like pre-Musk Twitter because the moderation teams at both Bluesky and Original Twitter are primarily trying to remove/suppress posts that they consider to be illegal, violent, overt harassment, etc.; they weren't politically motivated. I am sure some conservatives will read this and be like BUT BUT BUT BUT -- but sorry, there have been a lot of studies done on this topic over the last fifteen years and change, and they've consistently found that conservative posts tend to outperform liberal posts on most social media, including Facebook and Twitter, and that the anecdotes suggesting the opposite tend to focus on posts that were moderated for being violent and/or overt harassment. Conservatives don't want to hear that "their side" gets moderated more often because they have proportionately more assholes that invite moderation, but as well-known Person In Need Of Moderation Ben Shapiro so aptly put it, facts don't care about your feelings.
So why did Bluesky end up proportionately more leftist (which is absolutely true)? Because while the moderation team at X may still remove/suppress posts that are illegal, X has, at a corporate level, very explicitly chosen a political side in a way that no other major social media company has. Bluesky's CEO has not, to the best of my knowledge, been promoting liberal conspiracy theories, hyping posts attacking conservatives, or joining the government to radically reshape it in ways that anyone even moderately right-of-center would find horrifying. When I read HN, it seems like those who still love Twitter/X seriously downplay how much of an effect Elon Musk's transformation into a loud, forceful reactionary -- and his insistence on making sure that Twitter/X reflects that transformation in the posts that it actively promotes to its users -- has had on its audience composition. Yes, I know there are still lots of people on Twitter who aren't Musk fans, aren't particularly political, might even be left-of-center, but his behavior has actively driven a lot of people off it.
tl;dr: Bluesky didn't actively choose to become left-of-center; Twitter actively chose to become far right, and those who were bothered by that but still wanted to be on social media largely ended up on Bluesky.
It's more that the "far left wing cluster" had something like a "we should all get up and leave Twitter for BlueSky" activist campaign. And "far right wing cluster" didn't.
The closest thing "far right" had to that was Gab and Truth Social, and that's both more specific and less impactful overall.
Thus, BlueSky's userbase is biased towards extreme left wing - it's basically the go-to place for far left wing nutjobs go when they get too nutty for Twitter moderation, or feel like Twitter is not left wing enough for them.