Bluesky Gets a Midterms Bump, Ships Pronouns-in-Bios Feature

New York Times opinion writer Carlos Lozada said on Wednesday after the Democratic triumph in the midterms the previous night, “I think Democrats across the board got A.O.C.’s memo: Woke 1 was crazy. We’re focusing on economic populism.” That does indeed seem like one popular mainstream media narrative. It may not resonate, however, if you’ve been on Bluesky for the past two days.

Bluesky is a social media platform where the trappings of old-fashioned wokeness were never actually shunted away amid the 2024 “vibe shift,” and in fact they sometimes seem like the coin of the realm for the site’s leadership. CEO Toni Schneider says the platform is suddenly “seeing  a wave of new people joining and old friends coming back.” 

If the idea of a Musk-free alternative to X sounds appealing, you’ll probably like Bluesky, and if it doesn’t, it’s likely not for you. As Elon Musk settled into his ownership of what was at the time known as Twitter, Bluesky came on the scene as a small, decentralized Twitter clone, conceived in part by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Some former Twitter users critical of Musk fled to Bluesky in 2023, but it really saw its user numbers climb in the aftermath of the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump.

In between big cultural moments for liberals and leftists, Bluesky has a dedicated base of users who post on it every day. They’ve been criticized in places like the Atlantic, and have a reputation as little more than the denizens of a deluded, liberal bubble, gathered to agree with one another and punish wrongthink. Last year, for instance, journalist and podcaster Jesse Singal showed up to troll Bluesky users who dislike his IDW opinions about transgender issues, and those users wanted him banned. “Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem” reads the title of Singal’s response post about this saga, which was published by the Free Press.

But Bluesky is a calmer place to read posts than X for most users. It offers a much less infuriating algorithm, very little spam, and close to zero AI content if you don’t want to see any. Bluesky users mostly post about normal things—the majority of them apolitical. If someone acts like a troll there, they will at the very least get mass blocked. That absolutely makes the place more of a political bubble—and that’s something Schneider is concerned about—but it’s also part of the platform’s immune system and keeps things pleasant.

However, as of July of this year, Bluesky use was dwindling overall. It already has just a small fraction of X’s daily active user base, but its daily active user count on mobile declined 25.6% year-over-year to around 3 million.

Then came the midterms.

Last night, before the polls even closed, Bluesky posted that it was experiencing a massive increase in traffic. Bluesky was claiming “200% of our usual data traffic—and climbing!” And this would have been in anticipation of a political bloodbath, not after the bloodbath had commenced in earnest. “Thanks to all of you for making this a night to remember,” Bluesky’s post said.

Before long, the Senate race in Texas was called for James Talarico, the Democrat, and the mood on Bluesky was one of elation in many places—a signal that a blue wave had truly arrived. But some of that elation was tempered by semi-ironic triumphalism, best summed up by the “Put the pronouns in the bio” meme. (sometimes phrased “Put the pronouns back in the email“).

The meme is not complicated. It’s a gun in a hand, tinted with the rainbow colors of a pride flag, and it’s aimed at the head of a beleaguered, slouching person. The party’s over for the anti-woke influencers and slur fans, in other words. Wokeness is back, the meme seems to be saying, and this time it’s not playing around.

On Wednesday, however a feature suddenly shipped directly to users that literally adds pronouns to bios. A user could, of course, already put their pronouns anywhere they wanted in the text of their bio, but there had never been a field specifically for inputting pronouns. The timing felt meaningful to users.

A Github page for a task related to adding pronouns to bios showed up on Wednesday evening, and I confirmed that the feature is newly live on my account. The feature really was added today. It certainly feels like it was added in honor of the Democratic victory.

But when I asked Bluesky, a spokesperson told Gizmodo, “The day-after-midterms timing is simply a coincidence.” This feature was in the works for two weeks, and just happened to ship today. “There was already a lexicon for pronouns, and multiple Atmosphere apps were already using it. Bluesky implemented the change today on the Bluesky platform itself,” the spokesperson told me. “Atmosphere” refers to the community of software built on Bluesky’s technology.