Bluesky has official community guidelines against “promoting hate or extremist conduct that targets people or groups based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation”, and violating these can result in content being taken down. But the website’s etiquette code extends far beyond the official rules. Some users have created shareable mass block lists to automatically block, for instance, all users who so much as follow a certain account. The blocking function, which has been hampered on Musk’s X, is used liberally on Bluesky, with popular posts encouraging the blocking of specific accounts perceived as hateful.

In this environment, the type of Left-wing content that once flourished on pre-Musk Twitter, such as concerns that the New York Times has a pro-Trump bias, has found a home. Journalist Taylor Lorenz is on the app, encouraging her followers to wear Covid masks and contemplating whether the red heart emoji has become a MAGA symbol. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin is on the site too, calling Tulsi Gabbard a “Putin stooge” and urging Democratic lawmakers to join the platform.

Bluesky gained one million new users in the week after Trump won the election, but some liberals who have remained on X warn that moving to the app will only exacerbate the perception of the Left as being alienated from working-class Americans. Past efforts to create Twitter and X alternatives have seen limited success. Mastodon, the app liberal Twitter users initially flocked to when Musk took over the platform, and Trump’s Truth Social both have small user bases compared to their main competitor. Since they’re respectively Left and Right-wing by design, they lack the engagement and conflict that made Twitter so successful. However, as content on X becomes increasingly Right-wing, and it becomes less popular, the once-dominant platform could face an identical problem.