Bluesky is courting the Swifties
Bluesky has grown by 2 million users — about 15% — since Donald Trump won the U.S. election last week. But the emerging social platform isn’t just acting as a refuge for left-leaning X users who are disappointed in Elon Musk’s alliance with the president-elect. A community of Taylor Swift fans, or Swifites, has also laid its foundation on the decentralized social app.
Almost 13,000 people on Bluesky have signed up with a “swifties.social” domain name, indicating their involvement in the Taylor Swift fan community. Other fandoms for artists like Beyoncé (about 900 members) and BTS (about 4,500 members) have also emerged.
These fan-driven domains, which function within the main Bluesky social server, came from a project that Bluesky developer Samuel Newman made in May 2023, before he was hired by the company. (Newman was also behind the third-party client Graysky before he got a job at Bluesky.) Newman’s tool allows anyone to claim subdomain handles from a domain that you own. For example, Newman bought “kawaii.social,” which now has about 450 members. Using his tool, we could technically snatch up “techcrunch.kawaii.social” as our domain, but alas, that might not be as consistent with our brand as our current “techcrunch.com” handle.
“It’s taken off in ways I didn’t expect. I originally made the tool thinking people might want a ‘bsky.london’ handle or something like that, but it turns out that the handle is a great signal for what kind of account you are, and stan accounts absolutely love being able to self-identify themselves like that,” Newman told TechCrunch via Bluesky DM.
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I think this swifties just want to show Trump they're still against him 🤦. But I doubt Elon cars much about it. But anyways I wish this was InLeo getting the users rather than Bluesky
Maybe one day it'll be us