Yes to Bluesky, no to Twitter/X. So went my thinking in late 2024, coincident with a sharp fall-off in traffic to Twitter/X and meteoric growth at Bluesky.
A year earlier I’d toyed with Meta’s competitor, Threads, but I quickly lost interest in it.
In the aftermath of the Trump election in the United States there was a highly noticeable drop in activity on the platform purchased by Elon Musk more than a year earlier, back in late 2022. Although the man has undeniable talent in numerous fields (electric vehicles, reusable space launch vehicles, tunnel boring machines, direct brain stimulation through implants), a perception by some that he had used some of his vast wealth to swing the American presidential election led to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to cancel or park their Twitter/X accounts.
Anyone active on the platform immediately noticed follower counts beginning to drop. My Twitter account has a modest number of followers. It was just shy of 12,000 the day before the American election. In the week following the count dropped by three hundred. Not a lot, but highly unusual in my experience.
Although I have had a Bluesky account from the inception of that social media platform, I had made little use of it, only occasionally making posts. Started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was a bit of a sleeper platform until the Trump election. At that point the daily active user count began to rise dramatically as a consequence of millions of new signups.
As I began to make parallel posts to both X and Bluesky it was apparent, at least to me, that the engagement level on the latter was far ahead of that on the Musk-owned platform. Even though the supposed daily active user numbers differed by as much as a factor of ten, the engagement on Bluesky did not reflect that gap.
Engagement on Bluesky also appeared to be gentle and respectful, something not always seen on Twitter/X. Moreover, Bluesky says it will not employ user posts as source material for training AI engines, something Musk is now doing with Twitter/X posts for his Grok platform.
Over the next two months I pretty much duplicated my activity on the two platforms. My follower count on Bluesky steadily increased, although it is still a long way from that of X. However, about a month after the initial post-Trump drop-off, my follower count began to increase once again and as I write this column it has recovered all of the loss. Whether this is due to returning users, or to completely new sign-ups, or perhaps some combination thereof, I can’t say.
Following the Trump inauguration there are signs that another drop-off may be occurring on Twitter/X. Time will tell. Arguably Musk damaged the Twitter brand from the moment he purchased the service. Firing almost the entire workforce was just a beginning. Twitter had problems before Musk but it was an entrenched, if not beloved, brand, with influence across the planet. It remains influential to some extent.
Meanwhile, Bluesky’s growth pattern continues. Numerous high-profile accounts have appeared and many journalists and newspapers have moved to the platform. Besides citing the acerbic and abrasive atmosphere of the Twitter/X environment, some of these organizations have noted that Twitter has placed limits on interactions with tweets, limits which do not exist on Bluesky. Those limits, to what is known as the API, were instituted by Musk in an attempt to monetize the platform through businesses which generated large interactions with their tweets.
Musk’s apparent meddling in foreign elections has elicited strong condemnation, particularly in Germany, and, to some extent here in Canada. It is interesting to note that the City of Vancouver is considering closing its Twitter/X account because of this sort of meddling, and because of the unbridled content, sometimes hateful, or racist, or otherwise discriminatory, which now permeates the platform.
If indeed the City of Vancouver joins say, the District of North Vancouver, which deleted its X account on Jan. 21, there will be some irony in the fact that Musk’s first job was in Vancouver, working for a forest products business.
A French university professor has begun offering a tool, HelloQuitX, to help users of Twitter/X migrate to other platforms. After all, it is sizable follower counts that keeps some from starting all over again on another platform.
Esteemed science publication Nature polled its Bluesky followers with this result: “Roughly 6,000 readers answered our poll, with many declaring that Bluesky was nicer, kinder and less antagonistic to science than X.”
Musk’s personal actions, mostly tirades about anything to which he doesn’t take a shine, have spooked advertisers. Using the Twitter/X platform to essentially spread a form of state propaganda under the guise of free speech hasn’t helped bring advertisers back on board.
Bluesky has a very similar interface to that of Twitter/X. There are still many differences but these seem to be decreasing with time. However, when it comes to breaking news coverage, Twitter/X still comes out on top. You can easily test this for yourself next time there is a major event, an earthquake for instance. Within seconds you will find news in the form of tweets on X; less so on Bluesky.
For now Bluesky is mostly devoid of so-called bot and junk accounts, but as its popularity increases you can expect these to make inroads. I’ve encountered a handful of such accounts and have blocked them.
Whether these moves away from Twitter/X, not only by governments and newspapers but also by numerous sub-reddits on the popular Reddit platform, ultimately doom the platform, remains to be seen. For now, Bluesky is basking in the glow generated by the posts from millions of new accounts.
Follow me on Facebook on Twitter/X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (@petervogel.bsky.social).
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