The era of Sports Bluesky is upon us

If you’re familiar with Bluesky, the emerging social media platform that’s looking to replace X/Twitter, you might know that it wasn’t always synonymous with sports.

In fact, there was a period of time where the mere lack of sports talk was something of a running joke on the platform. Paul Frazee, one of Bluesky’s developers, even referenced it in February when he jokingly posted: “Welcome to the world’s leading sports social network.”

But all of that changed a lot pretty quickly. Bluesky suddenly feels like there is actually a legitimate, sustainable sports community that will continue to grow. That’s why it’s worth assessing what progress it has made and where the app will be in the future.

It’s quite remarkable how much Bluesky has exploded in the last few months and its user base is now over 25 million people. Big brands like ESPN and The Athletic, which hadn’t been on it at all for over a year, are suddenly using it, as are prominent sportswriters like Chris Haynes, Ian Rapoport and Ken Rosenthal.

Officially official.

My first @bsky.app post.

— Ian Rapoport (@rapsheet1.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 9:42 am

Big personalities like Mina Kimes, Mark Cuban, Ben Stiller, and Zach Lowe also frequently post on it, while sports teams like the Trail Blazers, Mets, Pirates, Royals, and Aces now provide the same team updates they post on X.

Actively avoided by many sports fans for over a year due to the lack of sports discussion, Bluesky is now a place where you can get all the major sports news while hearing from most notable sports journalists. It’s a platform where you can hang out without feeling like you’re actually missing out on anything essential from a sporting perspective, other than interacting with the specific holdouts who refuse to deviate from X.

The reason for Bluesky’s rapid explosion is largely because people are fed up with It also helps that Threads, the other prominent player in the microblogging game, is so functionally unintuitive and so reliant on a culture of contentless engagement Posts that it’s frankly inconceivable that it could ever catch X, which leaves the door open for Bluesky – with a user interface virtually identical to that of X – to be the natural heir to it.

As slow as Bluesky has been at implementing certain features, what has kept it viable all along is that it is the only Twitter rival that truly understands how to capture the essence of what made Twitter attractive back when it was was actually still Twitter.

However, it helps that Bluesky has added the important features that sports fans need to make the switch. The app no ​​longer requires an invite code to join, direct messaging has been integrated, and video uploading – the linchpin of any thriving sports community – is finally here, which is super important because without the ability to scroll through highlights, are the most recent The growth that the platform has experienced in the sports space would simply not exist.

However, there are still some features to be added, notably group DMs and the ability to upload longer videos at a higher resolution (currently videos can only be 60 seconds long and you can’t post more than 25 seconds per day). . One day, a verification checkmark system will also be a must, because while the platform allows domain handles – which are helpful for brands like ESPN and the Mets to prove they’re legitimate – it leaves behind single notable people who do do. They don’t have to maintain their own personal website (and that’s practically everyone) to have to fend for themselves on the honor system, which is tolerable for now, but won’t be sustainable in the long run since sports fans tend to make up fake headlines.

While there are some improvements to be made, which are ultimately understandable considering how new the platform is, there are more than enough boxes ticked for someone looking to escape X to choose Bluesky if necessary. And people should I want to escape X for Bluesky.

What makes Bluesky so attractive, despite its current limitations, is that it’s a much healthier place to talk about sports than X. You can scroll through your timeline and not come across a single ad (unlike X, which won ) You can no longer even watch two-second videos without an ad attached to the back. You can post things and not be bombarded with porn spambots inviting you to look at their bios. You can check your DMs and not have to sift through spam for bots shouting fake job offers at you. You can receive a notification and not have to brace yourself for the possibility that it is something unnaturally unpleasant that you are dealing with. You can browse the app and not worry about coming across massive, explicitly racist, sexist or homophobic accounts – unlike on X, where users like Gentile News Network and Garbage24 are so proud of their bigots that They regularly share content with posts containing the N-word and other slurs, but they still have hundreds of thousands of followers and are in no danger of ever being suspended.

Mina Kimes on migrating from

http://dlvr.it/TGM3pm

(image or embed)

— Terrible Announcement (@awfulanncreasing.bsky.social) November 23, 2024 at 8:41 pm

It’s only when you actually use Bluesky for a while and detox from It’s not just that the user base of It’s that buying a blue check is on

Plagiarism aggregator accounts, which have become so numerous on NBA Twitter that one account, NBA Central, has nearly 2 million followers, flood the conversation by spreading gossip to fill out their timelines, acting as a constant source of news . NBA Central, for example, tweeted a whopping 78 messages this year about Shaq and the things he said on his otherwise unimportant podcast.

LegionHoops, another of the largest NBA aggregator accounts, has tweeted 45 news items surrounding Paul Pierce this year, almost all of which were about things he said. Not only has the proliferation of posts like this resulted in the app being drowned in constant bickering and strife, as almost all of these shared items are extremely negative, but it has also had the trickle-down effect of bringing down countless other gimmick accounts and Inspiring aggregators to set up Well, who has undoubtedly noticed how quickly you can improve yourself through formulaicness?

The sports community on It’s so incredibly easy to become a hater account on X that some of the biggest accounts aren’t even run by adults. “Hater Central,” one of the countless gimmick accounts that athletes amass whenever they have a bad game, was started by a literal 16-year-old. In just a few years it now has 132,000 followers.

None of this is the case with Bluesky. There is no profit incentive for posting on this site, and therefore the people who post about sports there are only doing so because they actually do How them. That’s how it should be!

It’s truly incredible how much more pleasant it is to talk about sports on Bluesky compared to X, where the user experience can best be described as a miserable slog. There are no prominent aggregator accounts on Bluesky, no prominent Stan accounts, no prominent Muse accounts, no prominent accounts dedicated to cheerlessly engaging with athletes whenever they have a free evening, and no prominent sports accounts that stir up offensive or hateful feelings.

Conversations about it feel natural and aren’t dictated for the sake of engagement, while the biggest accounts on it are prominent journalists and writers, as opposed to people who have more or less bought themselves a big account, as is the case with X.

Is this thing on?

(image or embed)

— ESPN (@espn.com) December 6, 2024 at 4:36 p.m

The sports community on Bluesky is a fraction of the size of the one on X, which is of course the biggest factor in why people stay there; People are on

But anyone who has seen Enshitting in action knows that not only will X keep getting worse, but it will keep getting worse until one day it shrinks and dies. And when that inevitably happens, Bluesky is not only in a great position to take over its user base, but it’s already a far better experience without it.

It is impossible to say how safe Bluesky is. When people hesitate to join Bluesky, it is because they are not ready to trust any Tech companies more and are so inclined to avoid the constant merry-go-round of platform hopping that they have resigned themselves to simply staying on X until it sinks into the sea.

But I’m willing to put my trust in Bluesky even if I did some Be concerned with that. For one thing, I think the platform needs to be more aggressive when it comes to blocking accounts of hateful and bad-faith agitators. Secondly, I’m worried about the possibility that the upcoming Premium service will compensate or reward users in some way for the purchase, as this could lead to the same chaos that X Premium (aka Twitter Blue) caused on X .

And yet, despite all of this, it seems to me that those in charge are genuinely interested and genuinely interested in creating a great product, and I believe that the app they have created will one day be a better and healthier home for the sport than Twitter ever was.

Sport Bluesky is a big deal. How much of it there will be depends on a number of factors, but for now if you’re looking for a place to get some exercise that won’t ruin your brain as much as X, it’s definitely worth checking out Attempt.

The author of this article can be found at velodus.bsky.social