Rob PegoraroBluesky’s blockbuster week
Something remarkable has happened in social media over the last seven days: A non-trivial number of people hit a personal breaking point with X, Threads or both and either set up Bluesky accounts or started using ones there that they’d left dormant for months.
Since last weekend, the decentralized short-form social platform launched in 2019 as a Twitter research project and that required an invite code to use only nine months ago has seen its user totals climb by about a million people a day above previously modest numbers–from more than 15 million users on Wednesday to above 18 million users per a real-time count Saturday night. As I write this, Bluesky sits atop the chart of free Android apps and is ranked second after Netflix in the iOS free-apps chart.
My own follower total has about tripled over the past week, which looks like table-stakes growth compared to what other people have reported.
But the stats barely tell the tale. So many of the people whom I used to regard as my reward for putting up with the noise of Twitter even after Elon Musk’s conquest of the platform have pivoted to posting mainly or only on Bluesky. Some examples: the avgeek community (but not yet airlines), a recently-growing slice of Election Twitter, even some of my local elected representatives and such local appointed political types as Metro’s can-do general manager Randy Clarke.
(Disclosure: I sent a constituent e-mail last Friday to the youngest member of the Arlington County Board, Maureen Coffey, asking her to try meeting her constituents on Bluesky and suggesting two Arlington-related starter packs of people to follow. Coffey has since become an active user, not that I necessarily had anything to do with that.)
Many of these new Bluesky arrivals appear to have reacted to Musk putting his billionaire foot on the scale to support Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House by outright deleting their Twitter/X accounts, then sharing a screenshot or a GIF on Bluesky of their “X-it.”
(I’m keeping my Xitter account public and not deleting my past tweets—I’ve linked to them too many times, and sometimes find that the easiest way to find an old link is to search for a tweet that shared it. I also continue to read X, although that’s become increasingly unnecessary over just the past week.)
Other recent Bluesky converts have pointed to Meta downranking political and news discussions on Threads in favor of… whatever Meta’s inscrutable algorithm shoves into the “for your” timeline that I can’t opt out of on the platform that still gets far more traffic than Bluesky. As former Republican campaign strategist turned never-Trump activist Rick Wilson wrote Monday on Bluesky: “I’d hoped threads would be at least somewhat flexible about political content, but here we are.”
Everybody can bring their own reason for making this decision. Mine starts with business logic–why should I bother sharing my work on X when that site downranks posts with links?–but cannot be separated from Musk’s moves to turn that platform into his own right-wing propaganda playground. Especially when that playground has welcomed back such loathsome liars as disgraced conspiracy “theorist” Alex Jones.
Meanwhile, I can’t look at the Threads app icon on my phone without thinking of how Meta has consistently shown how little it values my profession. Or how the day-to-day experience of algorithmically-pushed slop on Facebook makes me wonder what Threads will look like once it starts welcoming advertisers.
For several months, I thought that Mastodon might be the short-form-social escape pod I needed, but Bluesky has delivered a simpler setup experience and, more importantly, is built on an open-source protocol that allows for a complete export of your account to another server. That option exists more in theory than in practice to date, but it’s not possible at X and consists only of a sort of settings portability at Mastodon. Bluesky is now the better bet.
So that’s how I am refusing to stay with a platform owned by somebody who considers people in my line of work an obsolete obstacle–or to switch to another platform owned by somebody else who seems to sees little more value in my profession. I may not stop either of those services from ending up with the most eyeballs, but that doesn’t require me to lend my own eyeballs, much less my own typing fingers, to their causes.
#ATProto #Bluesky #bsky #ElectionTwitter #ElonMuskTwitter #fediverse #Mastodon #skeets #socialMedia #tweets #X #XOdus #Xit
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