BLUESKY.CHAMPIONED BY JACK DORSEY, WAS SUPPOSED TO BE TWITTER 2.0. CAN IT SUCCEED?

Bluesky, the internet's hottest members-only spot at the moment, feels a bit like an exclusive club, populated by some Very Online folks, popular Twitter characters, and fed up ex-users of the Elon Musk-owned platform.

Musk is not on it - and this might be part of the appeal for those longing for the way things were before the Tesla billionaire bought Twitter and upended nearly everything about the social network, from rules against harassment to content moderation to its system for verifying prominent users'identities. It also helps that Bluesky grew out of Twitter a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors.

"It was designed to replace Twitter," said Sol Messing, who worked at Twitter as a data scientist until January and is now associate professor at New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics. "And you can see it in the way that the system is designed. It works like Twitter!

But can Bluesky replace Twitter? Prominent Twitter users such as the model Chrissy Teigen, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Dril, a humorous account that grew out of "weird Twitter" and has been poking fun at Musk since the billionaire took over the platform, are active users. Journalists, academics and politicians the users who helped make Twitter into the culture's zeitgeist - are also flocking to the app (if they can score invite codes).

"Really wondering about where the line is to leave the other place," wrote or "skeeted" Ocasio-Cortez recently, expressing concern about how Musk's Twitter will handle next year's presidential elections. "There's a line where the harm of unchecked disinfo exceeds the benefits of direct, authentic communication. It's really sad."

Bluesky, though, has bigger ambitions than to simply supplant Twitter. Beyond the social network itself, it is building the technical foundation - what it calls "a protocol for public conversation"- that could make social networks work more like email, blogs or phone numbers.