Many Bluesky users seem a little irked at the moment over a Bluesky post quoting the platform’s CEO Toni Schneider. In it, he said he wants Bluesky to shift away from being a liberal bubble. “‘Breaking’ is maybe the wrong word, but yes, we want to expand more and more so that Bluesky means not just one thing, not just liberal politics, for example,” Schneider said.
One interpretation of Schneider’s remark, which was pulled from a video posted earlier today by the Verge, is that Schneider wants Bluesky to be inundated with conservatives. “Did you ask him to describe the sort of person he thinks isn’t here but ought to be?” asked one user in a reply. Another user replied to that reply with “You know… Nazis who speak with a smile.”
Somehow managing to flood Bluesky with right-wingers could certainly pop the liberal bubble, but Schneider actually did give an example of who else he thinks should be on Bluesky: sports fans.
Here’s another excerpt:
“What we’re focusing on is to deliver a live experience.
We do it around elections. We do it around sports as well, very successfully, where the people on the network that participate get a really good experience and get really good content. Once we have that, then hopefully we can just keep expanding to more and more types of users and use cases.”
In fairness, some Bluesky users seem exasperated at the superficial reaction to the Schneider quote. “Good lord I wish some of you could read on this text based social media website,” the user Scoiattolo wrote. They included a screenshot of the quote above.
I don’t know if you follow sports on X, the everything app, but while it is pretty good at feeding you news updates about the sports teams you follow, it also shows you a ton of recycled and deceptive clips, along with mountains of sports engagement bait.
Bluesky’s cleaner, more civil, less spammy environment is an improvement in some ways, even if Bluesky is still not quite the raucous sports watch party experience you can get on X. The Trending module on Bluesky is good at reminding you games are on, and knowers of ball are on Bluesky, posting insightful and funny second screen content.
At the moment it’s easy to get the impression that the sports fans of Bluesky are of the “liberal” “progressive” or “leftist” political persuasion. For what it’s worth, Schneider says his company has “made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports writers, and it’s worked really well.” He says, per the Verge, there’s “a ton of sports conversations now on the app, and those people come here for the sports, not for the liberal politics.”
Sports talk, and all other us