‘There’s No Such Thing As A Post.’ Playing with Names for Bluesky Posts.
Image source: Unsplash - @brianna_santellan
Initially, I thought the term ‘tweet’ was far too twee to become part of mainstream culture. Yet, it did. Indeed, what cemented Twitter’s cultural significance and place in mainstream media environment was arguably the seamless integration of its terminology (such as ‘tweets’, ‘retweet’, etc.) into the lexicon of everyday life. Is repetition all that is needed to achieve this? Say it enough and it sticks? Possibly. But, another factor, I argue, was the ability of the Twitter to smuggle affective meaning and suggest specific connotations with its rhetoric and imagery. The logo of a bird evoked the gentleness of nature. This was then reinforced by the term ‘tweet’ (the word for the chirping sounds a bird makes) as a name for the posts. We could engage with the platform, and we could tweet with abandon because of the lightness and smallness of the term, because they were something natural too. By the time we realised these messages of small meaning (by which I mean their meaning to us in the quotidian sense) also could have big meaning too (i.e. influence on society and the world), we were already entranced, already lured in by the term.
Other platforms have experimented with names for their posts (e.g. FB status updates) and with names to differentiate between different kinds of posts (e.g. Instagram Reels, Stories, etc.). The decentralised platform Mastodon had the name ‘toots’ for their posts, which again tried to invoke the sound from their animal company name/logo. That was until they seemingly lost their nerve and changed their ‘Toot’ button to ‘Publish’. Although, given the decentralised federated nature of the platform, not every instance or app followed suit. For example, the instance I am on uses ‘Post!’, while the Mastodon client/app I use, Tusky, still uses the Toot! button.
As far as I can tell, officially posts on Bluesky are still called posts. However, the unofficial name for them is ‘skeets’. It seems the term is a portmanteau of ‘sky’ + ‘tweets’, and functions as a noun and a verb - a skeet, to skeet, skeeting, etc. However, it doesn’t appear to be a widely accepted term. In fact, back in April 2023 Bluesky CEO, Jay Graber, asked users to stop using skeets as a term and to ‘bring back skoots’ (Fig. 1), which was an earlier name suggestion for the posts (See Figure 2. below).
Figure 1. Post by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in April 2023. Image source, screenshotted 2nd Dec 2024
And, in my opinion, it is frankly a horrible name for the posts. ‘Skeets’ is generally hated for two reasons: 1) because the word is also slang for ejaculation, and 2) because it is a clear riff on the name for posts on Twitter. Arguably, anything too evocative of that site, including the -eet morpheme, should be something you want to move away from, particularly if your choice of logo was designed to emphasis change and transformation. A butterfly doesn’t look like a caterpillar, right? Even if we all know that’s where it came from.
Despite the animosity towards the name, any alternatives that are suggested have failed to gain traction and seem to be quickly dismissed. But I want to play around anyway. Let’s ‘try out more words before the culture and nomenclature gets cemented’.
Figure 2. Post by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in February 2023. Image source, screenshotted 2nd Dec 2024
What’s in a name?
So what does the name need? This is just my list, of course, and I guess some of these are more ‘desirable’ rather than ‘essential’ characteristics.
‘Fun, catchy, easy to meme off’; ideally monosyllabic.
Needs to function well as both a noun and a verb.
Easy to pronounce; but also, as Graber suggests, should be ‘easily inferable’ as to the meaning based on the context. Relatedly, should not alienate outsiders or exclude newbies. Eugen Rochko, the software developer of Mastodon, suggested we should “strive to use terminology that is familiar to as many people as possible so as not to put up unnecessary barriers in understanding”.
Avoids unsavoury connotations or rude slang meanings.
Avoids replicating the -eet sound, which is associated with Twitter’s tweets.
Resonates with the imagery of ‘blue sky’ (name) and/or ‘the butterfly’ (logo).
Resonates with the idea of ‘communication’. This is in line with Graber’s point about a ‘semantic relation to posts’.
I should say that it is unlikely that I am the first to suggest the terms below; they’ll likely have been suggested before. I should also say that all these suggestions are also going to have an English language bias.
Many of the terms below start from the position that it is useful to imagine each post as a butterfly. As a pleasing side note to this imagining, there is an apt use of pinning on the platform. Users can pin important or exemplary posts to their profile. There is also a social practice which functions as a makeshift bookmarking tool. Users can follow the feed @jaz.bsky.social and reply to any post they want to bookmark with the pushpin emoji (See Fig. 3). Every post you reply to with a pin will appear in a custom feed. (Find this in Feeds on the left hand side, then under My Feeds. You can then pin this feed to your Home page alongside your Discover and Following feeds). This practice of pinning is reminiscent of lepidopterists pinning butterflies and moths for display and archiving.
Figure 3. The pinning practice as makeshift bookmarking tool in action. Follow the feed, and bookmark posts with the pushpin emoji like the users above
Potential names for Bluesky posts:
You could, of course, stick with Posts. However, it does seem a little boring, a little unimaginative, especially for a network whose name evokes limitless possibility - the wide open blue sky. Or you could stick with Skeets, despite the animosity and issues mentioned above.
My current favourite is Float. There are connotations and resonances with both butterflies and communication. Things can float in the air, while you can also float an idea. You can ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’, to quote Muhammed Ali. As term, it is somewhat self-effacing; there’s a lightness to it. Can function as a noun and verb - a float, to float, floating, floated.
I do like Flutter as a possibility. A term related to butterflies. Can function as noun and verb - a flutter, to flutter, fluttering, fluttered, etc. But not monosyllabic and has the -tter ending which is perhaps too similar to Twitter.
A similar word: Flit. Meaning to move quickly and lightly, and is also a noun - a quick sudden movement. Describes butterfly movement. Monosyllabic. A flit, to flit, flitting, flitted. Evidently, it’s old slang as a derogatory term for homosexual.
These next two are inspired by the hoped for Flapform Effect mentioned in my previous post, describing the potential for powerful effects from an initially small motion on the social media platform: Flap and Beat - ‘a butterfly flaps/beats its wings on one side of the world, there’ll be a tornado on the other’. But both these terms are hamstrung by established meanings and connotations. To flap, flapping, etc. could be construed as behaving rather nervously, e.g. to flap about. A beat, to beat, beating, etc. - while as a noun it could work, as a verb there more violent meanings attached.
The next few resonate with the blue-sky imagery. You could have Clouds. Although the imagery of a huge gathering clouds, a mass of posts, seems fairly ominous of a big downpour of rain. You could have Birds, although that is a little too close to Twitter imagery.
Maybe Azure, which is a shade of blue. Azure skies. An azure, to azure, azuring, azured? Echoes of the word ‘assure’, which has positive vibes. However, I imagine there’d potentially be pronunciation issues and barriers to understanding.
Or you could go with man-made objects that fly in the sky, e.g. Kites? Another idea is Drone. But very bad connotations. Nope.
The above are existing terms that could be repurposed. Another option is to construct a new word. For example:
Bleme (blue + meme). Blue for blue sky and meme for something shareable and spreadable.
I saw this brilliant suggestion on reddit: Stratus Update, a combination of ‘status update’ and ‘stratus’ - a type of cloud.
Another suggestion I’ve seen floating (ha!) around is Skite, a portmanteau of ‘sky + write’. It functions as a noun and a verb - to skite, skiting. It also has the added benefit of having ‘kite’ in there too - something else that flies in the sky. There are echoes of Skype, an established digital platform. As far as I can tell, there are no unsavoury slang connotations. In Australia and New Zealand, it’s slang for ‘boast’, which could still work.
Similarly, you could add an -e to the previously suggested Flit to make Flite. Homonym for flight. Could also be a portmanteau of ‘fly + write’.
Maybe Skribe (sky + scribe). Similar to Skite. A skribe, to skribe, skribing.
What, If Anything, Is a Post?
While I have been having fun playing with terms for posts, I have perhaps been missing the point of Bluesky. I have been conditioned by the centralised social media platforms of old. The point is perhaps not to have a single term at all. Echoing Deleuze and Guattari, I’ve been thinking far too much like a tree – linearly; centralised; hierarchical. The centralised hierarchical platform of old would say ‘these are the terms we will use’ and ‘these are the directions you can go’. But it’s not necessarily for them to decide. I should be thinking like a rhizome – as a multiplicity; decentralised; bursting forth any which way. And Bluesky is open space. There’s plenty of room. There’s room for different terms. After all, posts on social media platforms do different things. Lots of things fly in the sky, but they’re not all birds, or, rather, they’re not all butterflies.
I am reminded somewhat of this clip from the British TV comedy quiz show QI. The host Stephen Fry asks the panellists ‘What conclusion did the great biologist Stephen Jay Gould draw from a lifetime study of fish?’ The answer, it seems, comes from Gould’s book Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections on Natural History (1983). In the chapter ‘What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?’’, Gould claimed he “regret[s] to report that there is surely no such thing as a fish”. (This is also the name of pretty cool QI spin-off podcast, if you’re interested). Gould explains this further,
About 20,000 species of vertebrates have scales and fins and live in water, but they do not form a coherent cladistic group. Some—the lungfishes and the coelacanth in particular—are genealogically close to the creatures that crawled out on land to become amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. In a cladistic ordering of trout, lungfish, and any bird or mammal, the lungfish must form a sister group with the sparrow or elephant, leaving the trout in its stream. (p.363)
This is explained in a little more accessible terms in The Encyclopedia of Underwater Life (2005):
Incredible as it may sound, there is no such thing as a “fish.” The concept is merely a convenient umbrella term to describe an aquatic vertebrate that is not a mammal, a turtle, or anything else. There are five quite separate groups (classes) of fishes now alive – plus three extinct ones – not at all closely related to one another. Lumping these together under the term “fishes” is like lumping all flying vertebrates – namely, bats (mammals), birds, and even the flying lizard – under the single heading “birds,” just because they all fly. The relationship between a lamprey and a shark is no closer than that between a salamander and a camel. (‘Fish, What is a?’ in Campbell, A. and Dawes, J. (eds), 2005. The Encyclopedia of Underwater Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Gould’s point is actually to criticise this cladistic system of classification in evolutionary history by pointing out this situation. He argues, of course, ‘fish’ is still a convenient ‘umbrella term’. In this sense, a ‘fish’ does exist and is useful as a classification.
OK, this is a jumping off point to help with my Bluesky thinking. The lesson for my purposes is perhaps to acknowledge that a post is a useful umbrella term, but we must also recognise that individual specificities of each post. We call all content uploaded to a social media platform a ‘post’, when the morphology and purposes of each post suggests they actually have little to do with one another: One post is an image, one post is text, one post is video; one post aims to inform, one post aims to argue, one post aims to entertain; one post is from this community, one post is from that community, each with their own different origins, culture, and norms. So there exists an ecology of different kinds of (Bluesky) posts. They’re all ‘posts’ for taxonomic simplicity’s sake, but there could skeets and skites, and floats and flutters, and more. The ‘drone’ suggestion above could also be repurposed as a name for Bluesky posts created by bots…because they’re unmanned.
And it goes beyond Bluesky. A tweet is a post, a toot is a post, a skeet is a post, etc.
All this is solidified by another, more recent, post by Jay Graber (Figure 4). It may never have been posts vs skeets, but posts and skeets. But why should we limit ourselves to those two? Bluesky’s federated structure means “those interested in self-hosting could set up their own server, or instance, to cater to their own needs or those of a particular community. An instance can send and receive posts from other instances, like the one Bluesky itself operates, but can also block others, if they choose, and set their own moderation guidelines”. So it should follow that terminology can and will vary depending on culture and purpose.
Yes, it may not be simple. There may be barriers to understanding. But is this not what Bluesky is aiming for in the first place? A complex decentralised network that allows different communities to flourish and allows communities to tweak and develop in their own way. Potential, opprtunity, autonomy, ‘the sky’s the limit’, etc. This is the affective meaning that can be smuggled into the multiple names we can give Bluesky posts.
Figure 4. Post by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in November 2024. Image source, screenshotted 2nd Dec 2024
Related blog posts:
Playing with Bluesky Metaphors and Imagery (Part 1: The Butterfly in the Net)
Playing with Bluesky Metaphors and Imagery (Part 2: Blues Skies Ahead) - coming soon