🦋 To tweet or to fly
🐦 X'iting is catching on like wildfire.
The only brake on the inevitability of the sudden flight from X, formerly Twitter, was the lack of an alternative.
At first, it seemed Meta’s Threads might be the solution but burnt by its experiences with political content and being forced by some governments to pay for linking to news articles, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted nothing to do with promoting news and politics on his platforms Facebook and Instagram.
As a result, posting about politics on Meta’s sites suppresses reach and engagement (and it’s all about those likes now isn’t it!)
Step forward Bluesky, the Twitter dupe founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, (he’s since cut ties with the company) which now has 20 million users and is exploding.
Bluesky, denoted by a butterfly versus Twitter’s bird and X’s, well X, has a momentum that feels unstoppable. It’s now a lively, energetic site compared to the invite-only place I visited late last year only to find digital tumbleweeds.
The game-changer won’t be the journalists joining but world leaders and politicians, who have thrived by bypassing mainstream media and forcing cash-strapped news organisations and time-poor journalists into using their sanitised glossy PR distributed on their social channels, making it their go-to.
This looks to be happening. The EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has just joined. The EU has been taking on US tech platforms and past commissioner Thierry Breton was locked in a losing battle with Musk himself.
It’s mystifying why left-leaning leaders, such as the UK’s Keir Starmer or Australia’s Anthony Albanese who is taking the world-leading step of banning social media for under-16s, aren’t doing the same purely to make a point about Musk, who is now all but an oligarch in Trump’s America.
(However, it’s worth noting and fascinating that Trump continues to post on his own Truth Social network instead of on Elon’s X.)
I doubt BlueSky will ever reach the heights of Twitter. In 2009 we were naively optimistic about what the disruption of the mainstream media gatekeeper model and democratisation of political information and news media would bring.
Instead of leading to smarter, more well-informed societies, we created spaces for people to find their thought-tribes and reduce their exposure to having those ideas contested, as happened in daily life when interactions were face-to-face and on the phone rather than by text.
Smashing the already-disrupted media business model has only reduced the quality of original journalism and further eroded trust in an institution few had much respect for.
In short, social media is now a proven toxin and many who drop off from X in protest will leave their online lives behind altogether and feel far happier for it.
But even if fewer people join a live micro-blogging news site in 2024 compared to 2009, it remains the case that a core bubble of elites still need and crave each other, thrive off instant conversation and yes, enjoy the ego trip of having the loudest, most far-reaching voice.
With Bluesky, it feels like we’ve landed on a platform that gives us that option and might just last - for now. Its strength is its back-to-basics approach whereby users follow the people they want (for me it’s all politics and national security nerds) and actually receive that content instead of the jumble that X has served up since Elon’s takeover.
Musk has shown once and for all just how simple it is to change the information metric, skew content to favour a political standpoint, set the frame and dominate the narrative.
If he’s doing that in the open, imagine what’s going on behind closed doors at ByteDance, the Chinese company that operates TikTok.
As a digital native, it was easy for me to spot these changes and try to work around them. For example, I use lists I built pre-Elon when verification was around that were organised by topic and jurisdictions (AusVotes for Australian politics, UKVotes for the British and so on) rather than the home following feed.
But even I was getting completely duped by fakes and misinformation and the removal of verification for journalists as part of Musk’s crusade against the mainstream media meant breaking news situations became far more difficult to navigate and quickly synthesise and sort information sources as to what was true and not. Twitter used to make that task easier but now it’s an active handbrake because you have to wade through so much misinformation and spend more time verifying and checking accounts.
Today, giving up on X feels easy, not so much because it is so obviously biased, but because it’s just broken.
Elon’s own tweets are inescapable even if you don’t follow him, the home feed is a clunky, angry affair of ads and weird blue-ticked accounts that post disinformation and never seem to budge from the top of your feed no matter how many times you close and reopen the app.
The $44 billion trashing of Twitter is a huge shame of course. Hugely significant people in my life slid into my DMs over the years, I’ve made hundreds of friends and contacts in different countries and stayed in touch with them through it, laughed endlessly at the memes and jokes shared and valued the rich veins of specialist knowledge and intelligence I’ve been able to tap into thanks to the brilliant minds on there.
It took more than a decade to build a follower count of nearly 119,000 people which is currently collapsing by the day as thousands of users abandon the site and I know I’ll probably never get that following again.
I’ll miss most of all the people who decide not just to leave X but social media once and for all, which is a certain byproduct of the current Xodus.
But we shouldn’t get carried away about Bluesky either.
Right now everyone is joyful to be bumping into each other in a new place. It’s a bit like checking out the new office. But once we’ve all settled into our new chairs and hotdesks, the same office politics will rear its head, regardless of the renovation.
Bluesky will have the same issues all social media sites have when it comes to content moderation and I find it difficult to believe that they won’t also eventually succumb to the practices that reward angry opinion-led commentary and polarising takes, none of which has led the public debate to a good place in any of the AUKUS countries.
I’ll forever mourn the great age of Twitter aka 2009 to 2012. They were wonderful, heady days and the disruption truly changed the nature of political journalism and made identities of reporters in their burgeoning years who would otherwise have had to wait decades to be noticed and recognised for their contributions.
For now, I plan to remain on X merely to keep an eye on how MAGA-land is behaving, interpreting and translating the world but I will be far less active with my energies devoted to the butterfly site.
So if you’re flying to Bluesky, please follow me there.
Bluesky is just a far-left echo chamber