Get off Twitter. Go to Bluesky.
This message is arriving probably too late to be necessary; The Verge reported Monday that there’s been a surge of more than 700,000 signups in the past week, to more than 14.5 million Bluesky users, most of them in the United States. No one really needs the data, because the arrivals are visible in more or less real time. Within the past couple of days Cambridge vice mayor Marc McGovern and city councillor Burhan Azeem have popped up, along with Somerville City Council president Ben Ewen-Campen and state Rep. Mike Connolly, finding an increasingly robust community of locals already posting.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like the old Twitter, where I last posted in November 2022. I tapered off quickly after Elon Musk bought it in October 2022 and began turning it into the “free speech” paradise known as X by welcoming back racists and liars who had been banned for breaking the rules of the social media app.
It was painful, because I loved the wit and usefulness of Twitter and loathed all other social media, but I was not going to stay any place Musk was.
There has been a migration of journalists and politicians since the election, and sports Twitter preceded them. Black Twitter seems to be making the move, and Swifties.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revived her feed at 5:40 p.m. Monday, saying hello and getting 57,000 likes and 5,100 responses, to which she replied nine minutes later: “I don’t even know why I stopped using this in the first place? Good god it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings.”
There have been previous surges every time Musk behaves with more than usual flagrant irresponsibility – encouraging race riots in the U.K., for instance, or flouting Brazilian law and getting his app shut down there wholesale.
While some people have been reluctant to switch and lose the audience they’ve accumulated on Twitter, I would say: “An audience of what?” Between the trolls, bots and the zombie accounts of people who are no longer active on the app, the numbers are lower than what Musk would like people to think. On Bluesky you will hear repeatedly that actual engagement on the site is giant compared with what the numbers would suggest on the former Twitter, whether it’s Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge (Followers on X, 250,000, followers on BlueSky, 9,600, “But my last two identical posts have received more engagement here than there”) or the Anonymous collective (Followers on X, 5.1 million; followers on BlueSky, 12,000, yet “We are seeing the same level of engagement, if not more with less followers”).
Musk paid $44 billion for the app, and by a Fidelity estimate last month he has lost 79 percent of the site’s value. Bloomberg said Twitter made $5 billion in 2021, but X made $3.4 billion last year, which was before a recent series of big departures. In addition to the testimony of users, it is hard to see secondary evidence of great engagement.
Bluesky is easy to join and has the look and feel of Twitter except for its lack of algorithm: You have to choose whom to follow, and until you do your feed will be empty. That’s made easy by searchable starter packs that let you subscribe to multiple accounts at once. A service called blueark.app will import your Twitter posts to Bluesky for a fee (the more posts, the more expensive). It’s safer than the former Twitter because of its effective blocks, including “nuclear block lists” that allow mass shutoffs of people identified as trolls, Nazis, Maga Republicans or other unwanteds. Users are urged to block quickly and without guilt.
It was shocking to me how long people and organizations stayed on the former Twitter, saying there was some benefit or a good to be accomplished. But the site is weighted toward disinformation, misinformation and hate. The very basis of the app – “free speech” in a “town square” – is a transparent lie. If you’re looking to win hearts and minds, you’d be as well off contributing earnest letters to the editor at The Daily Stormer.
In fact, Twitter is a solid example of a story shared on that very app by Baltimore’s Michael B. Tager in July 2020, relating how he’d been sitting in a “shitty crustpunk bar” when he saw the bartender refuse to serve another man. “The bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, ‘Out. Now,’ and the dude leaves,” Tager wrote.
The bartender explains that the guy, despite not doing anything obviously bad at the moment, had Nazi pins on his vest. “These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then they bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now,” the bartender said. “And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a problem.”
You can still find the thread on X, but Tager’s last post was in October. And he’s changed his screen name to “Michael B. Tager is leaving ’cause X is the worst.”
Musk didn’t just let the Nazis into his bar, but invited them there and egged them on and watched with amusement as they hung swastika flags and generally trashed the place.
Bluesky is a place where it doesn’t matter how many Nazis show up, because they can be made to disappear instantly into their own parallel Bluesky that you will never see or hear from. Pedantic, misinformed critics have sniffed that this lack of confrontation makes Bluesky an “echo chamber,” but in fact it’s more like the bar – or coffee shop or library – where you might overhear a good conversation and possibly join in without having it interrupted by a screaming Nazi or idiot child.
It’s also one of the only social media apps that welcomes links and doesn’t work against news and politics, unlike Meta’s garbage sites.
Get off X. Go to Bluesky. While America cannot immediately go back to before Donald Trump, you can within a few minutes effectively go back to Twitter before Musk.
A stronger
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Certainly, everyone should get off Twitter.
It should be noted, however, Twitter was a largely unregulated space before Musk which allowed Nazis to find each other and for Trump to and spread information incite hatred.
Despite him breaking Twitter’s TOS several times, he was never removed. Twitter was a big part of Trump’s rise (along with lazy journalists who couldn’t stop feeding him attention). Jack Dorsey both presided over the early 2010’s good times at Twitter and also made the ultimate call to keep racists and other kinds of bigots on, citing his version of free speech, which was much like Musk’s.
He is motivated by power and perceived shareholder value. Once he has fattened up Bluesky with users’ free effort and goodwill, he’s very likely to turn the crank on it to cash in at the cost of a nice conversion space and/or the health of a democracy.
I was never a Twitter user, preferring more carefully moderated discussions that prevents the aberrant behavior that of the sort that has dominated that social network, so I am glad to hear of the rise of Bluesky as a civilized space.
I agree. It is so much better – and smarter. I love the way that topics are organized and clickable, plus the “starter kits” of people and themes is terrific. A great place for both politics and the kind of academic issues that interest me.
Given how detached Cantabrigians are from the majority in the country about social issues and political preferences, is escaping into a bubble the right answer?
BTW, I am a lot on X, and I never see any of the content you allege. Ironically, you are spreading misinformation,