I feel like my recent foray into the social media app Bluesky Social was a bit of a precursor to the Christmas party season.

I always advise young people to not fall into the trap of drinking too much at the work Christmas party – the lure of free booze will bite you year-round. It is also prudent at the yearly soiree to keep conversations to a range of mind-numbingly boring topics including your own trade, general finance, weather, superannuation, and the kind of superficial details of your family life that you may share on Facebook.

I wasn’t drunk when I started my account on Bluesky, but I didn’t take any of my own advice about polite society, and I was permanently banned from Bluesky after one post.

Bluesky Social is marketed as a decentralised social media platform for open public discourse and was co-founded by ex-Twitter social media heavyweight Jack Dorsey. Dorsey left Bluesky in May encouraging users to stay on X (formally Twitter).

Bluesky has recently been widely touted as THE progressive alternative to the ‘toxic’ and increasingly free speech platform X. Progressive media outlets are declaring an exodus from X toward Bluesky on the back of the Trump victory, claiming the toxic tone of X is pushing people off the free speech social media platform.

The BBC reported that users have ‘jumped to Bluesky’ and that we are seeing people ‘flock to the platform’. The Guardian, has written an explainer about why people are ‘suddenly leaving X’ and have declared that ‘the exodus from X to Bluesky has happened – the era of mass social media platforms is over’.

Even PC Magazine has posted an article with the headline, Done with Elon? How to get started on Bluesky. I wonder how many readers of PC Magazine have tech skills so low that they don’t know how to start an account on a social media app?

Too many articles to mention have been posted in the last few days with the identical headline starter of What is Bluesky? Clearly, a lot of people want us to know about Bluesky, and that it is a viable competitor to X, even though user numbers are not comparable.

I didn’t start my Bluesky account to join a trend, or a party, I wanted to bookmark my username just in case it became terribly popular. I made the one deliberately provocative post to test the waters. That post was ‘gender identity is bullshit’. Without any further interaction apart from scrolling and one follow, I was permanently banned with a notice informing me that:

‘Bluesky explicitly prohibits abusive behaviour, and we aim to foster a respectful environment for all members of our community. All users must be treated with respect.’

Before the fateful notice, I spent a few hours scrolling through the content Bluesky had placed into my feed as a new user. There was a lot of people congratulating themselves for leaving X, talking about how quickly their follower count was growing, and celebrating the friendly and agreeable environment that Bluesky had created.

One person posted that they were so overwhelmingly optimistic about the enthusiasm on Bluesky for libraries, that she was sure that the Bluesky people were going to lead a revival in local libraries. These people have such a gentile political temperament that they can’t stomach the political opinions of more than half the population and they call classic books like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird ‘problematic’, so they are unlikely to be found in any library that doesn’t have a drag queen story hour.

Although the new Bluesky censorship has echoes of the pre-Musk Twitter, it is a step up in the banning stakes. I was permanently banned from old Twitter for saying that ‘men pretending to be lesbians is rape culture’ after two warnings for similarly dissident opinions. The tweet was in reply to a man who was pretending to be a lesbian, so although my comment was general, they classified it as targeted abuse at the man. We all knew the game… We had to pretend people could change sex, but tried to skirt the ever-changing censorship rules with wordplay.

Bluesky has a much more general approach to ideology rather than what Twitter called ‘targeted abuse’. The post I made on Bluesky was stand-alone and would not have had me banned from old Twitter. Unlike old Twitter, I was not given any explanation of how I infringed, even though it was obviously because I am gender identity critical, or what they would call a TERF.

Some posts going up on Bluesky contain what is, in my opinion, targeted and vile abuse to people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and J.K. Rowling, without any apparent recourse for the user.

I can hear the progressive cry that these are private companies, and they can set their own rules; this is true. Being forced to engage in societal politeness is not oppression. Last year I desperately tried to avoid a Christmas party boat cruise event with begging and manipulation and failed. I set my mind to enjoy the Moreton Bay cruise with snacks and pre-dinner drinks, a polite description for being trapped in a steel container on the ocean with drunken strangers.

It was obvious from the get-go that there was a storm brewing over the Bay, but in storm season in Queensland we take such things with a grain of salt. Surely the skipper, or whatever you call the driver of the vessel, would not take us into danger?

When the gale force winds began, the boat began swaying quite dramatically, but buoyed by social politeness and trust in the skipper, we all giggled nervously about the unanticipated excitement. Then the sideways rain came, some of us sheltered at the back of the vessel, just outside the cabin to watch an impressive storm from the relative safety of the small awning.

When the rain and the gale-force winds became too fierce for nervous laughter and jokes, the entire party was forced into the cabin where the gasses from the water closet began circulating throughout the enclosed area. The young barman very helpfully informed me that this was due to the sewage tank being subject to turbulent waters and releasing its gases through the cabin toilet.

Since the onboard entertainment was in the corner throwing up, the sales executives, who had been subjected to two hours of free drinks, started to play ABBA on a small speaker and dance Elaine-style while attempting to stabilise themselves on fixtures. This led to a rather diverting pole dance routine from a middle-aged woman in a short skirt who had vastly overestimated her flexibility.

I am not suggesting that Bluesky Social will be anywhere near as interesting and exciting as the boat party I attended, but one must remember that controlled environments are difficult to curate in tumultuous seas. Bluesky’s greatest fault will not just be the noxious gases that are released in a pressurised environment, the biggest problem is that it is mind-numbingly dull and like the old Twitter, will prove expensive to maintain.

The pre-musk Twitter was policed by a massive number of staff who could handle the relatively few but highly motivated dibber dobbers that are essential to the enforcement of authoritarian progressive speech dictates.

Already, the friendly and kind Bluesky users are weighing down moderators by reporting on each other. Bluesky Safety posted recently that it is drowning in content reporting, with more than 42,000 reports in one day, a record. In all of 2023 the app only received 360,000 reports in total.

There is nothing wrong with creating a controlled environment online or in real life. Christmas parties, for instance, are better when they are controlled, and with exits available and clearly marked. But political discourse is often rigorous and impolite and it is also essential to our democracy.

Since I have been graciously allowed back on the less moderated X, I have found that some of the far-right users have been offensive, I get anti-feminists calling me nasty names, and sometimes people say regressive things about women. Engagement farmers are also a problem. I manage my feed with blocking and muting. I also sometimes engage in public arguments with people I agree with on a range of issues, and this can end in a sharp and impolite unfollowing.

We have to grow up about the reality of public political debate. Tension and debate are at the core of politics, which is why X will remain the social media king for those of us wanting to engage in rigorous political discourse.

X is a large stable vessel, it’s not perfect and the skipper does seem a touch dodgy at times, but it is a much safer bet than trying to stop storms by pretending they don’t exist. Bluesky is not an open venue for political discourse, it’s a safe room for failing progressivism and wounded progressives.