Filling an Empty Room
Do photographers need yet another social media platform?
The last thing any working photographer wants to hear is that they need to join another social network. Years have been poured into the dominant, algorithm-driven platforms, painstakingly arranging our feeds, chasing follower counts, and trying to decipher the cryptic whims of a secret algorithm. We’ve all played the game, learning to appease our digital overlords with the right hashtags, posting times, and a reluctant pivot to video. The idea of starting from scratch, with zero followers in a new, unfamiliar space, feels exhausting.
The promise of the old social media platforms is broken. Your investment of time and creativity no longer guarantees a fair return. Hidden algorithms intentionally limit your reach, and the entire system now favors short-form video, burying other media like photos and text. These platforms have stopped being community spaces. They are now environments designed to benefit the company's numbers, not the users' connections.
This instability comes from a single source: centralized control with no accountability. The online spaces we built together are now at the mercy of their owners. These owners change the rules on a whim to create unfair payment systems and use the platform to push their own personal agendas.
This is where Bluesky enters, not as just another app, but as a different foundation entirely — structured as a public benefit corporation. It offers a radical proposition: control. Your main feed can be chronological, meaning your followers actually see your work when you post it. One impressive feature, "Custom Feeds," allows anyone to create or subscribe to curated timelines for hyper-specific interests. Imagine feeds for #LifestylePhotography, #ArchitecturalDetail, or #DocumentaryWork, populated only with relevant images and seen by people who intentionally sought them out. It’s a platform where the photograph is the point, not a vehicle for a trending sound.
However, there's a stark, unavoidable reality: most of the photography world isn't there yet. Search for the photo editors, galleries, creative directors, and even the bulk of your peers, and you’ll find a quiet frontier. This emptiness is the platform's biggest hurdle and the primary source of hesitation. Why shout into a void when your established audience is elsewhere?
This is the critical juncture where photographers must choose to be architects rather than tenants. The platform won't populate itself. If we wait for clients and curators to arrive first, we will be waiting forever. The change must be driven by a collective, pioneering effort from the creators who stand to benefit the most. It means consciously deciding to post there first (and then to the other platforms), to start the conversations, to build the photography feeds we want to see, and to encourage our community to join us in laying the foundation. It’s an investment, but not into another corporation’s walled garden. It’s an investment in building an open, stable, and art-focused home for photography online. Come and join PhotoPolitic and our miniscule following on Bluesky.
Image (Stairway to Heaven) courtesy of Mark Forbes from his book "Collected Memories".