Waffles eat blue skis | TechCrunch

Over the past few days, my blueski feed has been increasingly filled with mystical posts about waffles.

The round-trip appears to have started with Jerry Chen’s tongue posting, in the form of a social media sanctuary that is so recognised in blueski.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approved and quoted it, adding, “It’s too realistic. I’m going to try to fix this. Social media doesn’t have to do this.” Another user then asked, “Do you still ban Jesse Singal from y’all?”

Singal’s presence at Bluesky was the flash point last year. Bluesky built an early reputation as a trans user heaven, but Singal has been widely criticized for his writing on the issue of trance. The Change.org petition claiming that Singal violated social network community guidelines and called on Bluesky to ban him has received over 28,000 signatures.

In a follow-up post, Graber wrote: She also hinted at the controversy by posting a waffle nudge wink wink photo, similar to Singal.

Users continued to criticize her. When comparing the criticism with customers, and customers who are threatening to cancel their services, Graber asked, “Are you paying us? Where are you?” When another suggested she should apologize, Glover said, “You can try a poster strike. I hear it works.”

It may be fascinating to dismiss all of this as another example of leftist infighting, especially as blueski discourse has already shifted to the question of whether “clunkers” are sluries.

Or, as one satirical account suggested, there was a “one week gas leak on Bluesky HQ.”

However, the controversy highlights the ongoing tension between the company and some of its most voiced users. That’s tension that can be seen last month in skeptical response to the company’s updated community guidelines and repeated complaints that Bruski is too quick to ban Palestinians and trans users, while also providing generosity to large accounts like Singal.

Reducing this tension to a single cause may be simple, but I think much of it comes from a different vision of Brukey’s special thing. It can feel like a betrayal, especially when an early community of marginalized users appears to be reluctant to confront those users.

One user posting under the name Katie TightPussy speculated that Bluesky’s leadership has become disliked “having a massive social media app that he never wants,” and “suggested it spin-off so that he can go back to a land where he doesn’t need to think about the Plebeians’ opinions.

Certainly, when Graber did not respond to criticism in her post about the waffle, she resisted identifying Bluesky with a particular group or political tendency, instead highlighting a decentralized protocol that allows users to build on top of their own alternatives.

In the current controversy, she posted about “accelerating decentralization,” suggesting, “We are core systems architects. We can now build distributed networks and carry out our own moderation,” and that the company’s “future healthy discourse projects are undergoing some changes in the interaction models driving these dynamics in BlueSky.”

Graber may foreshadow part of this conflict when Bluesky started. She envisioned a distributed system where users could migrate elsewhere if they were unhappy with the leadership of the company. She reportedly wrote in Bluesky’s founding document that “the company is the enemy of the future.”