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
- To my mind, the last point means that what we saw in some quarters wasn't so much a rejection of the fedi as much as a timing/perception issue
- So, depending on what happens over there in the future, those people may ultimately be persuadable to try the fedi (or try it again)
- But, for now, the mass of people over there creates an undeniable gravitational pull for law people
- To be clear: I still believe in the fedi and strongly prefer Mastodon to Bluesky as a platform
- But I think it's worth thinking about why people are making the choices they are making now
- To that end, I haven't seen any law friends saying that search or quoting are what make them prefer Bluesky.
- Instead, I've heard more about timing (see above) and perceived difficulty of onboarding.
- I've also seem comments to the effect that some people just want a place where they can scroll a bit and find interesting content, without taking the time/energy to build up a follow list. No judgment here; just observing the different preferences
@design_law I have used the search function pretty regularly on BlueSky and hope FT search eventually shows up here. While I don't prefer BS to Mastodon, this is a quality of life feature I miss here.
Quote Retweets over there seems to be feeding a lot of the dunking that contributed to some of the toxicity on Twitter and has given me a better appreciation for the Mastodon devs' aversion to QTs, bearing in mind it's productive uses.
Sarah Fackrell
Noel French