Bluesky, the destination of the moment, is experiencing a post-election surge of new users as millions of mostly liberal users of X (nee Twitter) have moved over to the Twitter-like platform, which opened to the public last year. The platform had 13 million users by early November; 10 million more joined over the next month.
Now that social media is ubiquitous, growth in one platform often means lost users for another. The Bluesky migration suggests that the broader the “us” gathered together, the harder it is to prevent our falling on another. (Owners of giant social media platforms often imagine they can get good moderation for many users with little effort, when that is a distinctly “pick two” choice.)
On social media, the political is personal; migrating Bluesky users are signaling political separation from an increasingly conservative X and giving up on the idea of a town square that holds all voices simultaneously.
It’s obvious why liberal users might want to leave X. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 (and renamed it in 2023), he has reshaped the platform to be more welcoming to racism, misogyny and anti-immigrant and antitrans sentiment than even the old freewheeling Twitter.
Abandoning early promises to not reinstate barred users without the judgment of a review board, Musk reversed previous suspensions and bans for Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler; James Lindsay, an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. activist; and, of course, Donald Trump, who was barred after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Discover the stories of your interest
Musk hasn’t just made X more conservative; he has also made it harder for users to ignore far-right and MAGA content, dismantling tools they had relied on to filter out those voices. X was originally a rebranding of Twitter, but over time, the service has become, in internet parlance, a Nazi bar. Before last month’s election, though, that political transformation was not enough to cause massive defections (though several million users did abandon the platform). When Musk bought Twitter, he seems to have guessed, mostly correctly, that even users who disliked reactionary politics would not leave.
Social media’s proposition is access to other people; for any individual user, moving to a new platform means abandoning friends and followers, the source of social media’s so-called stickiness. Mere personal dissatisfaction was not enough to persuade people to move; some synchronizing event was required.
Trump’s election was that event. Staying on X suddenly seemed intolerable to many, but they still needed a place to go. Before the election, it was not obvious that Bluesky was the best destination. Threads, which is owned by Meta (alongside Facebook and Instagram), had many times the number of users.
If liberals on X were just looking for a populous new home, Threads would have been the logical choice. But Threads reportedly has plans to accept ads, and like most ad-supported services, it will have an incentive to fill users’ feeds with content they have not sought out, one of the issues with X as well.
Bluesky is not ad-supported, does not have the incentive to scale at all costs and provides moderation tools that it says “put users and communities in control of their social spaces,” a distinctly un-X-like sentiment.
Every large space needs moderation, and every moderation regime privileges certain voices and behaviors. Moderating content at internet scale is a famously hard problem, and when X dismantled most formal controls, it simply outsourced moderation to the most aggressive bullies.
Bluesky, on the other hand, has a sophisticated set of tools that allow users to simultaneously find people and organizations they are interested in while avoiding, muting or blocking ones they are not.
Letting users decide to whom they want to listen and associate with is not good for advertisers (or adventitious propagandists), but it is good for individuals and for like-minded communities. The people who most need tools to block Nazis and trolls are women with large audiences, as they receive the most abuse; post-election switches to Bluesky by high-profile users like Heather Cox Richardson, Mina Kimes and Quinta Brunson helped coordinate their millions of followers.
In a democracy, political conversation is a struggle between the need to entertain a wide range of ideas and the need for solidarity, so every group needs to be able to select which ideas to focus on and which to ignore at any given moment. It has proved impossible to design a digital space where progressive and reactionary voices even agree on rules of engagement, much less competing visions of society. The amplification of conservative voices and reduction in user control over their own feeds have made this increasingly difficult for liberals on X.
Every social platform is created with its users. Bluesky users are not looking to recreate Twitter. They seem to be, mostly, looking for a more curated experience of what they see and whom they talk to, on a platform that is not constantly trying to get them to interact with brands (the most soulless phrase of this young century).
If Bluesky turns out to be a long-term home for political conversation, it will be because, as also happened on early Twitter, the new arrivals create appealing new habits and norms, not just new content. (There is already some evidence this is happening; Threads is considering letting users opt to see more content from people and organizations they follow, Bluesky’s main advantage over Threads.)
The shift to Bluesky could falter. Bluesky could fail to find a workable business model. Conservatives joining Bluesky, the better to own the libs, could swamp the conversation. But movement toward a more communal platform has already been swift and vast.
Demand for social spaces that are organized around user preferences instead of advertiser preferences or owners’ whims may serve as a model for better spaces for political speech and a move away from “scale at all costs” business models.
