You Can Tell How Often Someone Uses Bluesky By How They Capitalise It

I've got a theory, and it's a stupid one, and I've now tested it enough times that I'm fairly confident it's also correct.

You can tell how often someone uses Bluesky by whether they write "Bluesky" or "BlueSky."

Not "Bluesky" versus "Blue Sky," which is a different and much more forgivable mistake. That's just someone who's never seen the word written down, guessing from having heard it said out loud once. I'm talking about the specific, oddly common habit of writing it as one word with a capital letter stuck in the middle, like it's a SaaS product from 2011. BlueSky. Camel case. A name nobody who's actually opened the app would ever type.

I post on Bluesky twelve times a day. Have done for two years. I have never once, not in 8,880 posts, typed a capital S in the middle of the platform's own name, because I have looked at that name so many times it's stopped being letters and started being a shape. And every time I see someone write "BlueSky," in a news article, a LinkedIn post, a reply from someone's dad, I know, before I've read another word, that this is someone who has heard of the thing rather than used it.

The Evidence

I went and looked into this properly rather than just asserting it at you, because I've recently developed a habit of checking things before I write a blog post rather than vibing at my keyboard.

The people who get it right are the people embedded in it. Check any bio, any post, any profile description written by someone who's been on the app for more than a fortnight, and it's "Bluesky," lowercase s, every time. They've typed their own handle into a search bar. They've seen bsky.app in the address bar. They've read the word off the login screen a hundred times before they ever posted anything. It's muscle memory at that point, not spelling.

The people who get it wrong are, without exception in my own casual survey of this, the people talking about the platform rather than on it. Journalists covering "the Twitter alternative" in a piece they clearly wrote in twenty minutes. A social media intern writing "Follow us on BlueSky!" underneath a post that's still going out on Twitter first. Someone's uncle, three weeks into an account he made because his book club told him to, still capitalising it the way his brain wants to capitalise any two-word-sounding name, because TikTok and YouTube and PayPal have all trained him that this is simply what tech names look like.

You cannot look at a word that often, in that specific lowercase form, and still misremember it, any more than I could tell you the wrong spelling of my own name if you paid me. Familiarity doesn't just teach you facts, it teaches you the shape of a word on a page, and "BlueSky" is what that shape looks like reconstructed from memory by someone who's only encountered it secondhand.

Why This Particular Mistake

"Getting a brand name wrong" isn't unique to Bluesky. Bluesky is just unusually well set up to get it wrong in this specific direction.

It's a compound of two extremely ordinary English words, which is most of the problem. Nobody misspells "Threads" or "Mastodon" as two capitalised words shoved together, because neither of those names is built out of parts your brain already has strong opinions about. But "blue" and "sky" are both nouns you already capitalise correctly a thousand times a year in completely unrelated contexts, and English has spent the last two decades training everyone that when a tech company mashes two common words together, the seam gets a capital letter. YouTube. PayPal. FaceTime. WordPress. The pattern is well-worn enough that your hands will produce it automatically for a new compound name unless something has overridden it, and the only thing that overrides it is having seen the real one, over and over, until that's the version that comes out instead.

Bluesky is landing squarely in that gap right now: common enough to be worth misnaming, new enough that plenty of people still are.

Where the Name Actually Comes From

It's worth saying where "Bluesky" came from in the first place, because the name is older than the app, older than the AT Protocol, and older than the company that now owns both.

Jack Dorsey posted about it in December 2019, while he was still Twitter's CEO, saying Twitter was funding a small independent team of up to five people to develop an open, decentralised standard for social media. Dorsey has said the push was partly inspired by Mike Masnick's essay "Protocols, Not Platforms," which argued that social networks were stuck fighting the same content-moderation battles over and over because the whole industry was built on closed platforms rather than shared, open standards, according to Wikipedia's account of the project's origins. "Bluesky" was just the internal name for that research team, sitting inside Twitter, with no app attached to it at all. It spent its first two years as a five-person research group rather than anything the public could use.

It broke off as an independent public benefit corporation in 2021, and the person Twitter's incoming CEO called to run it was Jay Graber. Her first name, Lantian, means "blue sky" in Mandarin. Her mother, who grew up during China's Cultural Revolution under tight restrictions on what she could read and watch, chose the name specifically to wish her daughter the boundless freedom she hadn't had herself, as Graber told Forbes. So you have a company called Bluesky hiring a CEO whose own name translates to Bluesky. Either that's one hell of a coincidence, or someone at Twitter had access to the world's most elaborate naming brief.

That arrangement didn't last forever, though. In March 2026, Graber stepped down as CEO and moved into the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) role, with Toni Schneider taking over as interim CEO. Then, on 10 July 2026, Bluesky made Schneider the permanent CEO. Graber is still there as CIO and board chair, so she hasn't exactly gone anywhere.

The public still had to wait a while before any of this became something you could actually use. The iOS app arrived as an invite-only beta in February 2023, with Android following in April. Bluesky didn’t finally drop the invite requirement until 6 February 2024.

Dorsey left Bluesky’s board that May. Around the same time, he started talking up X and Nostr as “freedom technology”, because apparently one decentralisation project wasn’t enough.

So by the time most people actually encountered the app, "Bluesky" had already been around for years. First it was a codename for a research project inside Twitter. Then it became a company. Then it became an actual app people could download. The word never really got the chance to turn into the sort of polished tech brand name that gets shoved into camelCase because a marketing department decided it looked futuristic. It was just Bluesky, and it stayed that way.

The Tell Gets Sharper the Deeper In You Go

There's a second, more granular version of this too, one that only shows up once you're far enough into the ecosystem to spot it. I run into it constantly, because I live there.

Calling Bluesky "a platform" undersells the actual shape of it. It's an app, the flagship client, built on top of something bigger called the AT Protocol, and the deeper someone is into that underlying layer, the more specific their vocabulary gets. Casual users say "Bluesky." Slightly more invested users start saying "bsky," lowercase, because that's the string sitting right there in their own handle and in the address bar at bsky.app. Go deeper still, into the people actually building on the protocol rather than just posting on the app built with it, and "Bluesky" mostly drops out of the sentence in favour of "the protocol," "AT Proto," or just "atproto," because at that level the app is one client among several and not even the most interesting one to talk about.

I'd love to tell you I catch myself doing this cleanly, but I checked my own back catalogue before writing this and the honest answer is messier than the theory wants it to be. I've used "Bluesky" and "bluesky." I've used "atproto" and "ATProto." I've used the full "AT Protocol" when I wanted to sound like I was being careful. There's no tidy rule sitting behind any of it, no internal style guide I'm secretly consulting. It's just whichever form my hands produce that day, depending on how formal the sentence around it feels.

So the dial's real, just noisier than I'd like, and I'm not exempt from that noise myself. The direction holds even where the precision doesn't. Nobody down at my level of the stack is at risk of typing "AtProtocol" or "Blue-Sky," because that specific error belongs to people who've only ever seen the name in a headline. The forms I actually mix up are all forms that only exist once you're already this far in. Getting sloppy between "atproto" and "ATProto" is still evidence you're close enough to the machinery to have opinions about which one looks better in a sentence. That's a different kind of inconsistency to the one this whole post is about.

The Rest of the Camel Case Zoo

Bluesky isn't the only platform name that gets mangled, but it's a useful comparison, because most of the famous examples are wrong in the opposite direction.

TikTok's own brand guidance is unambiguous: it's one word, capital T, capital K, "never written as 'Tik Tok,' 'tiktok,' 'TIKTOK,' or 'Tik-Tok'" in anything a company puts out, according to TikTok's own trademark rules. YouTube, PayPal, and WordPress sit in the same bucket: officially camelCased names, to the point that a widely cited style guide on the format explicitly tells writers to keep the internal capital for exactly those three, because it's the company's actual registered name and not a flourish anyone's free to drop, as this rundown of the format puts it. Write "Youtube" or "Wordpress" and you're the one who's slipped, not the other way round.

Bluesky sits upside down from all three. There's no internal capital in the name at all. It's a single lowercase word after the initial B, the same shape as "bluebird" or "bluebell," so "BlueSky" isn't someone forgetting the brand's own quirky styling. It's someone inventing a quirky styling the brand never had. You can watch it happen if you go looking for it: whole Substack posts and forum threads about the platform will use "BlueSky" for paragraphs at a stretch, camelCasing a name that was never camelCased to begin with, because that's what a two-word tech name is supposed to look like by now.

TikTok, YouTube, and PayPal trained everyone that squashed-together brand names get an internal capital. Bluesky is the one major platform that quietly didn't follow its own genre's convention, and the people who get it wrong aren't breaking a rule. They're following a rule Bluesky opted out of, without anyone telling them it had.

The Other Wrinkle: Which Decade You Learned the Pattern In

There's a second variable sitting underneath all of this, and it's got nothing to do with how deep into Bluesky someone is. It's the one I find hardest to be smug about, because it isn't a skill at all. It's just when you were born.

The camelCase reflex isn't evenly spread across every generation of internet user. It belongs to a specific stretch of tech history: the YouTube, PayPal, WordPress, iPhone, MySpace years, roughly the 2000s through the early 2010s, when a squashed-together brand name with an internal capital was the default look for anything trying to seem modern. If that was the era you actually learned your tech vocabulary in, the pattern isn't a guess you're making. It's the template, and Bluesky just happens to be a name that fits the template's shape without actually following its rule.

I went through my own follower numbers a couple of posts back and found that a large chunk of the people who followed me arrived during the 2024 Twitter exodus, plenty of them well outside the demographic that's spent their whole life on apps that never bothered with a capital letter in the middle of anything. That's not a criticism. It's just a different set of software they cut their teeth on, and TikTok, Discord, Instagram, and Snapchat don't hand you the same camelCase muscle memory that YouTube and PayPal did. Someone who came of age typing "tiktok" and "insta" without a second thought has no ingrained instinct telling them a two-word tech name needs an internal capital at all, because most of the names they grew up with never had one.

I turn twenty-one in five days, so I sit right on the seam of this rather than cleanly on either side of it. When I actually list what I grew up on rather than guessing at a demographic, it's YouTube, Twitter, Discord, Snapchat for a stretch, and Facebook so briefly it barely counts, and that list turns out to be a worse fit for my own theory than I'd like. YouTube's right there on it, teaching the exact camelCase reflex I just said my generation skipped. Twitter and Facebook never had a compound name to teach either way, so they're neutral on this. Discord's genuinely the odd one out, a single made-up word with nothing to camelCase in the first place. So even my own convenient story is patchier than the tidy generational split makes it sound. I got the pattern from somewhere, just not as cleanly as an essay likes to pretend.

The People Who Get It Right By Accident

The theory has a gap. There's one group who'll write "Bluesky" correctly without ever having used the app: careful writers by trade, or people who did the bare minimum of checking before publishing. A journalist who looked the name up. Someone copying it from the platform's own about page instead of typing from memory.

But it's a smaller hole than it sounds. It only catches people who bothered to check, and the whole point here is about the people who didn't. Nobody accidentally writes the correct lowercase-s version from memory. You either looked it up, or you've seen it enough times that looking it up would be redundant. Both are still evidence of contact with the platform, just at different distances. It's the "BlueSky" crowd, confidently producing the wrong version from memory, who are telling on themselves, not the ones who paused for four seconds to get it right.

What This Actually Tells You

I don't think this is a useful skill in any practical sense. I'm not about to start vetting sources based on capitalisation. But it's a small, free instrument for the same thing I keep writing about on here in bigger, more self-important ways: the gap between talking about a platform and living on one.

I found out, going through my own follower list two days ago, that most of my actual audience isn't the AT Protocol crowd I assumed it was. It's just people who read something I wrote and stuck around. This is the same discovery from the other direction. The people who write "BlueSky" aren't lying about being interested in it. They're just telling you, in one accidental letter, that their interest sits at the level of a headline rather than a home page. And the people who write "Bluesky" without thinking about it aren't smarter or more online than anyone else. They've just opened the app enough times that the correct spelling stopped being something they know and became something they can't get wrong.

Small tell. Reliable one, though. Next time you see it written the other way, you're not looking at a typo. You're looking at someone's account of their own relationship with the thing, whether they meant to give it or not.