💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 11-17.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
X's mass exodus: Why more people are quitting the Elon Musk-owned platform
Bluesky crosses the 15 million user mark
Stats for Bluesky by jaz (jaz.bsy.social)
It has been quite a couple of weeks over at Twitter. Elon Musk, the site's owner, is basking in the victory of Donald Trump, whom he significantly bankrolled. He continues to promote white nationalist memes and tweets, right-wing agitators, the sort of content that would generally get him slapped with the f-label (pick one) if the legacy media had any guts (and as the last US election cycle has shown, they definitely don't).
Kicking a Nazi out as soon as they walk in
But something in the mood seems to have shifted a lot of people's opinions of the platform. A few years back, Michael B. Tager famously told a story on Twitter about how he sat down in a crusty bar, and someone else walked in, and the bartender immediately told that person to get out. When asked about it, the bartender said that maybe Tager didn't see it, but the man had Nazi crosses all over his vest, and you have to deal with those sorts of people immediately, because if they don't, the next time they bring a friend, and they both become regulars, and they bring more friends, and suddenly, you're running a Nazi bar.
Why did the far-right rally around an account suspended for posting child sex abuse material?
Elon Musk agrees with tweet accusing Jewish people of 'hatred against whites'
That's how it works when you're a regular person, but there's been more than enough evidence, for years, showing that Musk has pickled his brain in right-wing online spaces. Last year he restored the account of a notorious right-wing agitator who posted a still from an infamous child pornography film ("For now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account," tweeted Musk). When another user tweeted that Jews were posting hate against whites, Musk replied with, "You have said the actual truth."
The tweets have always been right there. This is not some hapless rube of a bartender, letting patrons in until his bar's essential character has changed. This particular bartender's got a wink and a smile, plausible deniability, because the media is certainly hesitant to call him what he is, given how famously litigous he is. He doesn't even have to win: he has enough money to file nuisance lawsuits for the rest of his life. It doesn't have to ruin you; he just needs to wield the threat that it might.
I was done with the Nazi bar. I was sure others were, too. It turns out, I was wrong. For a while, anyway.
I left Twitter almost a year and a half ago, in the aftermath of the Lucre account reinstatement. This was not some cutesy hypothetical for me: if Twitter was being lax (and that's being generous) around safety controls, which it was; if it had fired most of its trust and moderation team, which it had; then I didn't have much confidence that one day, I might, due to the machinations of its famously right-tilting algorithm, wake up one day with vile and illegal content in my feed, and therefore on my device, in the browser cache on my laptop, you name it. When you're not the world's richest man, laws apply to you. So I decided, given the cesspit it had become, it was time to leave. I'd already started posting elsewhere: Mastodon, cohost, and within a month or two Bluesky. I was certain other people were feeling the same way, and that the exodus would begin soon. I said my goodbyes, and I waited.
I was...off by a bit. Based on what I've experienced in the last year or two, most people aren't willing to make principled stands on basically anything if it inconveniences them in the slightest. I slipped into a very small community of writers and weirdos on Mastodon, and a slightly larger one on Bluesky. I did my part, posted regularly, all the while hoping that people would start to come over from Twitter. I didn't hold out any hope that Mastodon would be the answer; while it is, in many ways, the answer for me, the platform most likely to be hanging around in ten years' time, it's clearly much too complex for most people, who need hand-holding, who need assurances, who need to believe that the followers they're leaving at the old place will be easily found at the new.
A few weeks ago I had a few hundred followers on Bluesky, and now I have that plus a thousand. It's astounding to me that in that time I've managed to essentially match the total number of followers that I built up over six and a half years at Twitter. I could guess at a few reasons for that: being there early helps, posting regularly lets people know that I'm an active and get a sense of which way my politics lean, just how insufferable I am, etc. But certainly the most important factor was being put in a bunch of starter packs just before everyone decided to give this Bluesky thing a try.
Introducing Bluesky Starer Packs
Starter packs seem to be a Bluesky innovation, and allow you to create custom feeds and lists of users, then easily share them with others. Bluesky, like Mastodon, has always given people more control over who they're following, and how. On Mastodon, I find even my 500ish follows to be incredibly noisy, and so while I dip into that feed regularly, I keep up with the most important follows (to me) by way of a list that contains maybe 10% of my overall feed. It's helpful! And Bluesky allows you to similarly customize your experience. Custom feeds are nice - Quiet Posters is one of my favourites, which shows you posts by people you follow who generally don't post a lot. But it's the recommended follows that seems to be driving the crazy and very unexpected growth I've been seeing in my number of followers. When you get to a starter pack, you can select any of the the recommended follows, and follow them. Or, and this is crucial, you just hit "follow all".
It's easy, people do it, and I've been doing it too. Poetry community? Follow. Canadian poets, or Southern poets? Follow. It's a quick way to get started, and solves the basic problem of modern social media, which is when, after having created an account, you stare at the screen, and wonder what to do next. Mastodon and cohost fell victim to this. The number of people I knew who created an account, who wanted to participate, and couldn't get going, was incredible. cohost I think was especially bad, its user protections functionally equivalent to discovery protections. And Mastodon, well - it's better, but when the advice to get started is still "follow hashtags", that's far from perfect.
User-curated lists of community are a powerful thing, and part of the reason why, since mid-week, Bluesky has been adding a million new users a day. These are staggering numbers, the sort that, if they hold (and they won't), would have Bluesky hit Twitter's monthly active user count in a year.
And it's hard not to see this as an exodus: in the past, when people have left Twitter, there's been a noticeable bump in users and activity - just ask any Mastodon users who had accounts prior to November 2022, when Musk formally took over. But the degree to which Bluesky is picking up is staggering. In the past, even with a few hundred follows, I'd have a quiet timeline. Or people were active, but people were crossposting in various places, some combination of Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky, but always the first.
But now? This feels different. In the last four days, Bluesky has added almost 4M people, growing by ~25%. This feels like an understanding that something has changed forever at the former Twitter, even if, some people would argue, that change started the minute Musk took over. Bluesky is hopping. Fetch is happening. People are delighting in the chronological timeline, the better block, the sudden influx of people, the lack of ads. The lack of fash. It feels fresh. It feels, well, not shitty. And maybe, hopefully, this is the beginning of the end for Musk's $44B investment. I can't help but think of Tumblr, which was sold for $1.1B to Yahoo in 2013. Six years later, it was sold for a mere $3M to Automattic. I don't know how much Twitter will be sold for next, but there's one thing I'm sure about: it will never be worth $44B again.