A famous Twitter proverb, perverted by multiple usages by Bluesky staff across two key exchanges since yesterday, is sending a bad message to Bluesky’s trans user base.

Jay Graber, Bluesky’s current CEO, engaged in this exchange yesterday. The Bluesky team has long faced accusations of favoritism towards power users like Jesse Singal, defender of conversion therapy and amplifier of trans fearmongering whose entry to the platform immediately threatened a schism of Bluesky’s queer users.

Singal was likely not the only motivating factor in Graber’s hackneying of the classic Twitter adage yesterday, but her doubling down with an ambiguous reverberation of it in a reply to a user asking about Singal lets us know that the user base’s opinion on Singal very much occupies her time. Graber has admitted to reading all of her own replies, which considering the path Elon Musk went on that made Twitter what it is today, is a bad sign. It’s also an especially poetic one, as Graber is the second person to take over a site made by Jack Dorsey with an apparent axe to grind against a fragment of its user base.

I wrote all of the previous paragraphs of this before this post came.

Needless to say, Graber is doubling down.

However I want to offer a modicum of sympathy - Bluesky has already become a mockery of punditry by Nate Silver, who tried to define Blueskyism by lazily calling it a mutation of three other “-isms” that don’t add up to much. It’s difficult to run a social media platform in a time where politicians spend all their time using them and making them backbones of their communication with the public. Have you seen how fucking much JD Vance tweets? Bluesky upper staff are likely aware and cautious that taking any definitive moves like banning Jesse Singal for breaking its terms of service would bring the platform negative attention, so they just changed the terms of service so he didn’t technically do anything wrong.

Graber’s claims that Bluesky is decentralized doesn’t hold water in a practical sense (Bruno Dias explains this in a way that helped me understand it.), for most users Bluesky functions as a replacement for the lost old Twitter where you could see things in reverse chronological order, look at a respectable amount of ads, etc. There is no way to simply dodge the effect that transphobic rhetoric that Singal pushes has on the Bluesky user base. Queer people and Black people (including and not limited to those who contributed to the building of Blacksky) were some of the first to jump ship or begin crossposting when Bluesky became a usable option.

The real problem here is that the waffles posts from Graber and other Bluesky staff are masterful strokes of equivocation that let the posts serve as sly disses at the general “bad vibes” for anyone that didn’t see what Graber was originally replying to: a direct demand for Singal’s removal from the platform. This comes after multiple instances of targeted moderation towards Gretchen Felker-Martin, who was hit with suspensions for a reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk and statements about J. K. Rowling. Removal of a voice from a platform is not just about who is deplatformed, but who is protected by that person’s deplatforming. Anyone who’s ever run a semisized Discord server has banned spam bots and bigots in the interest of protecting its user base. Who is Bluesky protecting by regularly suspending Felker-Martin? Who is it protecting by allowing Singal to remain? Queer users, many aghast at Graber’s blatant disregard for their demands, are starting to wonder where the next landing pad will be. I don’t have an answer for them. But I will leave you with the wise words of someone who brought clarity to this issue for me.