Bluesky! It’s the new hotness, which is to say the new app people are hoping will replace the Twitter-shaped hole in their hearts. I was super lucky to be invited a few weeks ago (I went with @andrea.bsky.social, breaking my years-long andrhia login pattern, find me there, tell me how to find you back.)

Now that I’ve soaked in the ambience of Bluesky for a while, I have some things to say about it. Let’s roll, kiddos.

Once upon a time, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had a dream. It was to make something like Twitter, but without the reliance on a single company and its profit-seeking and its shareholders. Something more resilient, something distributed, something where users could have control over their own data, man. So he started up a group inside Twitter to make that very thing. That was Bluesky.

Lucky for every single one of us, it was spun off into its own company about a year ago, before the… unfortunate events… that led to this moment. And today, it looks like Bluesky hit a tipping point, with large numbers of journalists and Twitter personalities coming on over.

It’s a real party, I have to say. I love it. It’s like Twitter back in maybe 2007, 2008. Then again, I thought the same thing when I checked out Mastodon last October.

So we’re going to see a ton of pointless slap fights in the coming days over whether Bluesky or Mastodon is better. The truth is that under the hood, they’re very similar and share closely aligned goals. Both aim to have a federated structure with multiple servers. Both aim to have a robust ecosystem of developers working on apps to interface with it. Both are making a new protocol that could in time replace not just Twitter, but Instagram, Soundcloud, YouTube, blogs. Both are responding to a need for users to be able to control their own experiences, though Mastodon is doing it at the server level, and Bluesky wants that to be in the hands of every single user.

Sure, each one has a few features the other doesn’t. Mastodon doesn’t have a repost function and never intends to, which has become a contentious subject. Bluesky doesn’t have a block feature for ill-intentioned users yet, or direct messages. (But they’re building them.) Mastodon has a confusing onboarding process that requires someone to understand the architecture of the network before they can really participate. Bluesky has a signup as smooth as butter.

The upshot? For right now, I’d liken the difference to the Mac vs. PC wars of the 90s. Each had some technical edge over the other by some measures, yeah, but at the end of the day they were pretty much the same. The difference — as it is here — was mainly in the user experience. That’s not just how many clicks it takes to get to the feature you want to use, though that is important. It also includes the look and feel of the thing, whether there are lots of buttons and menus and sliders or just a few minimalist icons.

Some people like being able to see all the guts and know they can tinker around and make something truly their own. Some people just want the thing to work without ever having to think about it. There’s not a wrong choice.

So vibes are the thing I think will make the difference, in the end. The two cultures are very different already, and I expect they’ll remain so. Mastodon is a caring place, it’s an inclusive place. The flip side is it feels easy to put your foot in your mouth. Bluesky is more rough-and-tumble, like a pile of adolescent dogs play-fighting. That means you’re a lot more likely to be offended.

Not to say Mastodon isn’t fun and Bluesky isn’t thoughtful. They both can be! But as anyone who’s ever made an internet community knows, you have to be very careful how the first days and weeks go, because the zeitgeist of a place will stay that way forever without an enormous amount of effort expended to change it.

And Bluesky is a lot more improvisational, unguarded, jokesy. I think that might be the winning formula: easy and fun. So let’s keep an eye on it. Maybe we’ll all be skeeting in no time. See ya there?