A new way to follow highlights is here
Nothing encapsulates the essence of social media platforms like microblogging websites. Thanks to character limits, every post is bite-sized and therefore primed for potential virality or memeability, and the real time nature of those posts made them ideal for spreading and commenting on news quickly.
Sports fans were eating good with microblogging. It allowed for a whole community to react to a news event or interact with each other and even with players themselves, who could send their thoughts into the social media landscape without filter. It wasn’t without its foibles, but it made great sports moments even greater through the online community it cultivated.
For the longest time, Twitter dominated the microblogging space. It simply worked, and its dominance led to a huge user base of anywhere between 300 and 600 million daily active users (depending on how you define it and what source you’re looking at). Baseball fans continued to use Twitter as the primary microblogging resource through last season.
But for the 2025 season, there is a legitimate competitor to Twitter that could disrupt how sports fans, teams, and journalists approach the microblogging social media space: Bluesky. I am fascinated to see where this goes.
this is how it feels to reach 30 MILLION users!!!
The elephant in the room here is Elon Musk, of course. Elon bought Twitter in 2022 and proceeded to implement a series of bizarre changes that objectively made the platform harder to use. Replies now prioritize “blue checkmark” users to such an extent that it functionally broke the usefulness of them in the first place. Glitches are much more common. Moderation is harder and safety, thanks to changes made to blocking others, is worse. It is more difficult to find relevant results when using the search bar. The algorithm has shifted to primarily reward Twitter engagement to the detriment of everything else.
These unpopular changes—alongside Elon’s very loud and very divisive politics—prompted many users to look for “the next Twitter,” whatever that may be. Mastodon was one of the first Twitter alternatives that went nowhere. Bluesky itself launched two years ago this month as an invite-only service and expanded to public functionality one year ago.
Bluesky functions as, essentially, a Twitter clone, down to its baby blue flying animal logo. There are some other tech-based differences but your average user won’t know or care. It harkens back to Twitter when it functioned before it became X: Bluesky just works. For most of its short life, though, Bluesky lacked the critical mass of user base that was needed to be useful. I didn’t spend much time there, especially during the 2024 MLB season.
That has changed. Users have flocked to Bluesky by the millions; since the close of the 2024 MLB season, the Bluesky userbase has tripled and eclipsed the 30 million milestone before the start of Spring Training. That figure is six times higher than it was during the start of last year’s Spring Training. The Kansas City Royals legitimately weren’t on Bluesky last year. Now they post regularly on Bluesky.
For the first time since Twitter’s foundation, there is a microblogging alternative with increasing momentum. This is a big deal because it represents a huge change in the social media landscape, and users bleeding to another platform, which seems to be the case, could change how news is broken by journalists and consumed by the public.
Again, the critical mass is important—if enough Royals fans are posting along with games on Bluesky this year, it will only become a bigger and bigger deal. Only time will tell.
…and be sure to follow Royals Review on Bluesky either way.