I Left X for Bluesky and I’m Loving Social Media Again
You don’t have to be on Extremely Online to hear that things aren’t going well on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. After the company went private, Elon Musk fired the vast majority of its employees, abandoned legacy verification to promote paid users instead, and tweaked the algorithm to highlight inflammatory political content and misinformation , and not all users are happy with the changes. According to recent reports, users are deleting their X accounts at a rate never seen before – and many of these disgruntled people appear to be heading towards clearer skies.
Bluesky is just one of a number of X alternatives that have attracted some former Twitter users over the past two years, and over the past few months it’s starting to look like it really has the potential to become the “new Twitter,” thanks for reading. no small part of its rapidly growing user base – the site has grown from fewer than 10 million users in September to nearly 16 million today, about two million of them since November 6.
Mastodon may be more technologically advanced and egalitarian, but its complexities may be intimidating to newcomers . Threads has a much larger user base , but as a subsidiary of Meta, it suffers from many of the shortcomings of Facebook and Instagram (Meta’s overly aggressive algorithms). Bluesky, on the other hand, is a decentralized social network that recreates the feel of “old Twitter” in almost every way – from layout to functionality to the atmosphere I swear I was back in 2008.
People are now using Bluesky
This wasn’t entirely true when I joined in mid-2023, when the site was still in invite-only beta and few people seemed to be using it. I reluctantly stayed on the increasingly toxic X because that’s where everyone I followed was writing. But no more: oddly enough, I’ve seen dozens of my once active Twitter friends finally embrace the new network, whether they use X or cross-post to X, or abandon the latter entirely . It’s expanding so quickly that it’s having some growing pains ( the site was briefly unavailable earlier today and may go down again ).
It’s not just that I follow incurable online weirdos exclusively (although I probably do). Because Bluesky is an open source network, all Bluesky metrics are publicly available, and its recent growth is not just due to the addition of users: the number of follows, likes and shares is also growing rapidly . It turns out that social networks are more attractive when more people use them.
And here the question arises: who uses it? Before X came along, Twitter had a reputation as a kind of online “town square.” Although it had far fewer active users than Facebook, it was a site where everyone could communicate with everyone else—you could follow celebrities, politicians, or newsmakers and tweet them. They might not respond (or even see it in the thread of mentions), but it was a place where people who had something to say said it to each other.
It’s too early to say that all of these people will move to Bluesky, but many of them will. In the past week, people from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Dionne Warwick have joined or reappeared on the site. The Guardian has announced its exit from X, and it seems only a matter of time before the news organization comes to Bluesky. In short, it feels like something is happening . Momentum exists where none existed before, and all it took was a massive political upheaval. Fun!
Speaking of which, is it true that these are just “liberals running from X,” as the Washington Post chose to put it? May be! If this bothers you – because you don’t consider yourself a liberal, or because you have opinions about “presenting a different point of view” or the dangers of “online echo chambers” – I would remind you that no one is obligated to use the service. which makes them feel bad.
There is no algorithm (if you don’t need one)
Another big benefit of Bluesky is that it has abandoned what has made social media so toxic and addictive (in the worst way) over the past decade: algorithms designed to give you what the site thinks you want. want, not what you could get. I really want to. I’m old enough to remember a time when both Facebook and Twitter offered simple chronological feeds. You could log in and see only the content you wanted to see, without having to endlessly scroll or interact with rage bait. Those days are long gone.
But not on Bluesky: while the site offers an algorithmic “Discover” feed based on your interests, it’s entirely optional. The default feed contains no algorithms and only offers a chronological list of posts and shares from people you choose to follow.
After years of not being able to log out of Facebook and X, even after my feeds were filled with ads, hate, racism and manufactured garbage, just being able to see only what I want to see is like leaving a boarded up house. a house filled with rotting air and the sunlight of a bright, clear day. (Someone funnier than me describes Bluesky as a lifeboat escaping from a sinking cruise ship whose remaining passengers are all infected with norovirus .)
Good mood
Again, anecdotally speaking, since there is no algorithm working overtime to piss them off, Bluesky users seem to be having fun – the atmosphere is, they say, good. If you’re good at following who you follow, you’re more likely to see posts that you find interesting, provocative, funny, or touching. You’ll still see posts from outside your immediate circle as your followers share others’ content, so things can still go viral, but it will be on merit and not because the person who posted it paid $8 for this privilege.
I think it’s good! Not because I’ve become more popular on Bluesky (my average post still hovers around two likes), but because using it doesn’t make me feel terrible, even when the world is terrible (which it usually is).
Easy to get started
Perhaps most importantly, Bluesky’s current exponential growth continues because it is quite easy to start using. There are tools that make it easy to find everyone you follow (or who follows you) on X. People are also sharing user-created “starter packs” of like-minded people you might want to follow based on your interests (everything from “Moviesky”, filled with refugees from “movie Twitter”, to “Blacksky”, where many black people live). creators).
You can even use a Chrome extension to import all your old tweets into the new platform , if you’re a sick person like me.
It’s still social media
I just told you all the reasons why I have fun on Bluesky, but it’s still social media, which means your relationship with the site will only be as healthy (or unhealthy) as you allow it to be. We still live in far too interesting times, and it’s easy to fall into gloomy scrolling or get into nasty arguments with strangers in which each of you vehemently defends your reactionary point of view on an extremely complex topic that you only understand about 5% (or understand) . is it just me?). While Bluesky has a robust moderation tool—people have nicknamed it the “nuclear block” —that allows you to kick bad actors out of your mentions and prevent them from seeing your content, sometimes the best course of action when social media is getting you down is to hang up the phone and go touch the grass or look at the real blue sky.