Mastodawn

Sarah Fackrell Jul 8, 2023

Okay, so some observations after a week of social media turmoil:

- A LOT of #LawTwitter people (including a fair number of law profs) migrated to Bluesky last weekend.

- It appears that many of them already had invite codes but didn't use them until Twitter melted down (again).

- Related: At least one of my friends noted that during the last Great Migration (November) they weren't really sure Twitter would implode, so they weren't ready to jump (or fully jump) quite yet

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Benjamin

@design_law Have certainly seen a lot of "waiting to see where things land" - ie. where everyone they know is going.

Although Threads is going to draw a lot of people in for this reason I suspect that LawTwitter's gravitation towards BlueSky makes sense given the reduced friction of signing up compared to the alternatives.

I could be making judgemental assumptions here... but I'd guess that having an Instagram account or at least following the same people on Instagram as on Twitter is probably pretty rare for people in LawTwitter. Similar to how a lot of science people I follow on Twitter don't have Instagram accounts or if they do it's unlikely that I'm following there because it's not where they post their science content.

- Threads is out, because they'd have to make an Instagram account, phone number, name, Facebook, all that malarkey. (Though also not being able to filter to your followers would also make discussing legal topics here undesirable anyway, so that may also be a factor)
- Mastodon is out because they had a look earlier or heard all the complaints during November and it's exhausting to even think about.
- That leaves BlueSky, invite code from a friend, email and password. Bam, you're on. Similar experience as what you're used to, no messing around with servers.

Certainly has been interesting to see how things have been landing though... what a mess.

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Sarah Fackrell Jul 8, 2023

@benjamin Yeah, I suspect you're right. I guess we'll see how things shake out.

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Benjamin Jul 8, 2023

@design_law Well at least the shake up has resulted in me following people that I'd probably never have discovered otherwise. Beekeepers to design law, my twitter feed was nowhere near as interesting...