Blueskya Twitter-style social media site with short posts has exploded in popularity since last week, adding 1 million users in that time. A lot of people hate X, especially if they hate Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Nazisor algorithmic flowsor shadowbanningor personificationor commitment agricultureor porn frenzy. Can Bluesky be the solution to all these woes and a lasting replacement for the site that was once Twitter? I really doubt it.

Alas, people, myself included, were inspired to even ask the question. While white supremacy, scams, and pornography are real and worsening problems on X and other social networks, I’ve written before in Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all others: people just they are not meant to talk to each other so much. X’s decline is a sign that we may be soon free from social mediaand the compulsive, constant attention-seeking it normalized. Counterintuitively, Bluesky’s rise is also a good sign, that so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Quitting social media will take time and inspire relapse.

For all its growth, Bluesky lags far behind Meta Threads — the recent Mark Zuckerberg he told investors that its Twitter-like app adds 1 million users each day. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. Meta added buttons to access Threads on Instagram so any of its 2 billion users can slide right over, even if they never end up posting there. Meanwhile, Bluesky seems to be attracting real users, especially in the United States, which i want to post and follow.

Read: The era of social media is ending

A network of any kind – social, communication, epidemiological – is only as effective as the scope of its connections. Two decades ago, when social media was new, it was easier to develop a rich and wide network because no one had one yet. MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn helped people build databases of the connections they already had—friends, family, schoolmates, co-workers. Twitter was among the first social networks to encourage people to connect with anyone – to build a following. That, as well as its distinctive short text format, made Twitter what it was. Among other things, it has become a distinctive place to watch global events live and to share and interact with journalism. It was also a place for brands to interact with their customers and for companies to provide customer service.

Bluesky has yet to find its distinctive identity or purpose. But to me, one of the users who started using the service in earnest this week, it feels more like the early days of social media than anything else in recent memory. The posts I’ve seen and made are stupid and awkward instead of savvy and too online. For now, Bluesky invokes the sense of carefree seriousness that once—really and truly—enshrouded the internet in its entirety. Gen Xers and Oldennials who were already out of college when Facebook started will remember the strange and delightful experience of rediscovering lost friends on the service—people you haven’t seen or heard from in years. days. Now, that strange delight itself can be rediscovered: I felt something similar when I saw my Bluesky migration plugin automatically locate and follow thousands of users I hadn’t seen on X or Twitter in years .

But the internet’s media ecosystem is more fragmented this decade than it was in the last. Uncertainty about the future of social media raises existential questions about the major platforms: Will TikTok be banned? Will X become state media? Will the Bluesky bubble grow beyond this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will disappear. Meanwhile, however, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, hosting news, performing identities, picking fights, and accumulating cultural capital, or wanting to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we can’t help but try to keep them going as long as we can.