When we last spoke about the looming death Twitter (X), I wrote that “nowhere else has emerged to fill the void”. After this week, that no longer seems quite so true. In the past fortnight, millions of users have jumped ship to the decentralised microblogging platform BlueSky. It’s topped the charts in the social media sections of the app stores. It’s had write-ups everywhere from Bloomberg to Vox to the Telegraph to USA Today, with search-optimised headlines like (this from the Independent) “What is Blueksy and why are people leaving X to sign up?”. This is exactly the sort of coverage that most apps can only dream of, and is likely to have driven the numbers even higher. On Thursday, the platform topped 15 million users, up 50 per cent in a little over a month, causing it to temporarily crash. The outage got coverage on the BBC, too.
The trigger for all this, of course, has been the electoral consummation of the bromance between the world’s richest toddler and president-elect Donald Trump. Since buying Twitter and rebranding it in a manner strangely reminiscent of a teenage boy painting his bedroom black, Elon Musk has been doing everything he can to make it a hostile environment for anyone to the left of Mitt Romney. He removed the old system of verification; throttled views on any post with links, thus undermining the site’s value as an aggregator; and reportedly forced content from paying users and himself into everyone’s feeds.
The final straw was threatening to remove the block function to make it harder to get rid of the upsettingly wide range of far-right agitators the site offers you these days. Whether all this actually helped swing the presidential election is currently unproven. But with Musk now lined up for a job leading the new department of government efficiency (“Doge”) in the second Trump administration, a lot of users have clearly had enough. And so: X-odus.
Why has it taken so long? The short answer is it’s hard to leave while other people are staying. Whether people saw Twitter as a virtual public square, or just the best place to chat to their mates about TV shows, the value of the platform was always in its network. With nowhere to go, enough people stayed put.
But finally, this week, the dam broke. The Guardian became the first big media brand to announce it was abandoning Twitter, suggesting that everyone would not stay put forever. Around the same time, a critical mass of people were arriving on BlueSky, a platform whose very look and name were chosen to suggest, “Twitter, but like the good old days”.
There are a couple of extra functions it provides that made it an attractive prospect. One is the ability to remove your posts when other people quote them; another, a block function so comprehensive it shuts down the offending conversation for everyone. Both will make it much less prone to pile-ons. But the one feature that’s enabled the rapid growth is “starter packs”, through which users can curate lists of accounts that newcomers can follow at the press of a button. It’s like everyone simultaneously realised they don’t have to lose their Twitter network after all.
Actually – not quite everyone. Those who have made the jump are overwhelmingly on the liberal left, with even moderate conservatives far more likely to have stayed behind. Whether this will last is an open question; whether it is bad, a matter of debate. (I think it is.) Some have also expressed disquiet about abandoning Twitter, as though we are ceding territory to the Maga-right. But a platform is not a country: the value lies not in the space, but in the connections made there. If those can move, the benefits remain.
BlueSky, too, perhaps will one day rot and die. But not yet. And it will, in any case, be nothing new: who mourns today for MySpace? The joy of this week has been the reminder that the networks, connections and friendships we built on Twitter can and will survive. Bankruptcy, Ernest Hemingway once wrote, happens gradually, and then suddenly. Elon Musk may be about to find out the same can be said of the death of social media platforms, too.
[See also: Rachel Reeves’s retirement revolution]