Your Guide To Bluesky, The Official App of Sports
Using the power of sports, we can extract people from the society-destroying influence of Elon Musk
In a culture fragmented into ten million constantly-evolving, mutating, vanishing pieces, sports is the last refuge of a shared reality.
That's how I've come to see it, anyway. No one watches the same movies anymore. No one listens to the same music. The price for having the entirety of human knowledge and experience and culture at our fingertips is the disorientation and alienation that comes with cultural fragmentation. It's a heavy price to pay in exchange for scrolling through endless selections of media, bogged down by the paradox of choice.
So we're left with sports. The Game is always on. The Game is always watched by those who gather on the internet to talk about the Game, to analyze it, to imbue it with meaning because really, what else are we here to do if not give meaning to our existence.
The Game is a unifying force, as silly and meaningless as it might mean in this age of global democratic decline. This decline, of course, is driven by the isolation and alienation that flows from a fragmented society. We flock to the Game and we have discourse with other social animals who need community to live. The Game offers us all this while everything else around us shatters and floats away into a digital void in which we search for meaning and contentment.
I've written a few Bad Faith Times blogs about why, exactly, I see Bluesky as an important part of crawling out of the authoritarian snake pit we find ourselves in today. Bluesky is decentralized. It is structurally resistant to Silicon valley oligarchs bent on shaping the world in their image. It is not controlled by a blackbox algorithm designed and manipulated by amoral tech oligarchs closely aligned with autocrats and tyrants around the world. Bluesky is, in short, a good online gathering place for those who long for a shared reality. Bluesky is good for sports.
That's why sports content has exploded on Bluesky over the past few months, as Elon Musk's large language model pumps out child sexual abuse material and disinformation that serves the international fascist movement. Folks have moved toward Threads – another social site owned and controlled by a willing handmaiden of autocracy – and Bluesky, which, I think, feels enough like pre-Musk Twitter to keep people engaged.
Denny Carter
Extracting people from the fascist muck and mire of the X platform formerly known as Twitter can help pull people away from Musk's reality-shaping algorithm meant to suppress pro-democracy voices and elevate the influence of authoritarian fanboys and girls. There's plenty of research (and anecdotal evidence) showing Musk's hostile takeover of the democracy-friendly Twitter – without which Trump would have won in 2020 – has left even the apolitical among us awash in right-wing misinformation, having their views unconsciously shaped by Musk himself. Maybe this shouldn't come as a shock considering Musk is the planet's No. 1 vector of misinformation.
Bluesky is still social media. It'll make you anxious and depressed like any other social media; that should go without saying. But if someone has to be online, they might as well be on a nontoxic platform where trolls can easily be blocked into oblivion and human dignity is respected and even celebrated.
Bluesky: The Home of Sportsball
Bluesky starter packs – lists of accounts posting about a given topic – have proven critical in helping folks transition from Musk's fascist wonderland to a platform that is not manipulated to benefit the richest man alive and his vile political and business allies.
Sports starter packs have helped a bunch of writers and podcasters and analysts establish an audience on Bluesky over the past few years. That includes me. I spent a dozen years on the site formerly known as Twitter before making the transition to the pro-democracy Bluesky platform in 2023.
Starter packs have helped people new to Bluesky find their various sports communities, make connections, and create a new home for consuming sports content without the poison of fascism leaking into every crevice of their social media scroll. On Bluesky, starter packs are everything.
it’s all anyone is talking about
— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T22:47:57.432Z
Below are Bluesky starter packs for (mostly) every sport. There's no excuse anymore for visiting Bluesky and immediately bailing because your favorite sport isn't adequately represented. That might have been true in 2023 or 2024, but no more. Sports have come to Bluesky in a big way. If you don't believe me, just ask the anti-sportsball Bluesky folks furiously making block lists to stop sports posts from appearing in their timelines. Sports are everywhere all the time.
A lot of folks say they like Bluesky but can't find anyone who roots for or covers their favorite team. They then leave and scurry back to Musk. There's an easy solution that this: Go to the Bluesky search bar, type "starter pack" and your team's name, and see what comes up. I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to find a Bluesky community coalescing around a team. Hey look, I just found a New England Patriots starter pack! Oh hey, there's a Denver Broncos starter pack!
THE sports app. (c) @dennycarter.bsky.social
— Jeremy Spitzberg (@jeremyspitzberg.com) 2026-01-19T02:39:31.065Z
Tell your friends. Tell your family. Get people away from the society-destroying influence of Elon Musk. Recruit people one at a time if that's what it takes. It makes a difference. Tell them they can still have their sports content on Bluesky, which many are calling the official app of sports.
Bluesky Sports Starter Packs
Comments ()