How does having a really tightly controlled and/or lengthy invite period translate into the user base being of one particular political viewpoint? I'm not seeing the causal link. Even if I take at face value your claim that "only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in," I still don't see how these subgroups or subcultures would necessarily have the same political views.
My point is normal people who aren't extremely online and part of 10 Discord servers with an internet friend network who can hook them up with an invite didn't get into Bluesky. Instead the people who, well, did, got the invites. Obviously the extremely online right didn't because they had other places to go and weren't welcomed by the bsky admins.
Early BlueSky was seeded by furries, the trans community, socialist Democrats, and left-wing folks fleeing an overly Republican/MAGA Twitter.
The system was invite-based, meaning these people invited their friends. And those people invited their friends of friends.
The community was seeded by a very political base at its inception. The general feed the average user saw when opening the app was activist-political, furry art, dildos, and outrage. This continued for a year, I think?
This is not very welcoming to a general audience, and it severely knee-capped Bluesky's growth trajectory.
Here's the front page of Bluesky for a new user today:
Yes, I understand now that this is what the poster I was replying to was saying. But it's different from that poster's original argument, which I took to be that there was something inherent to the invite process that resulted in a politically one-sided user base.
But really, it's that Twitter shifted hard-right to literal Nazism, and so people left. Which is completely understandable.
>there was something inherent to the invite process that resulted in a politically one-sided user base
At no point did I make this claim. Bluesky's user base self selected for left wing viewpoints because Twitter had taken a hard right turn and Bluesky, mostly by way of moderation, was unwelcoming to the right wing. So left leaning people had a reason to leave Twitter and a friendly platform. Right wing people had no reason to leave Twitter and a hostile platform with Bluesky.
