In just the past day or so, Bluesky has reached 15 million followers having doubled its user base in the past 90 days including over 1 million in the past week alone. The proximate cause for the shift is related at least in part to Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter for $44bn and whose commitment to ‘free speech’ (and firing 80% of the staff responsible for trust and safety) has led to a great increase in online hate. His subsequent shift to supporting Donald Trump and other right-wing causes or criticising the UK government for its response to the riots in August (or indeed for fueling the riots in the first place) has helped speed the exodus of those not aligned with Musk’s views.
Yet, despite the exodus of advertisers after the Musk acquisition, many remained sceptical as to whether there could be a viable alternative. A number of still-viable alternatives have arisen including Threads (owned by Meta), Mastodon, WT.Social, whereas others have already disappeared such as Post News and Pebble. Indeed, Threads has a much larger user base (275mn) than the other competitors and is integrated with Instagram. The Threads (and Instagram) CEO notes that they have added as many followers as all of Bluesky in the past month. However, Threads has assiduously tried to avoid politics and current affairs and so has never tried to replace Twitter’s former role as a ‘town square’ for news and policy discussions.
Apart from politics, another often-cited reason for switching has been over concern regarding the algorithm imposed by X as to which tweets are shown, and the algorithm to display content on Bluesky is much more easily customisable. Given the growth in active users, another important reason for the switch is that many users claim that they are generating more engagement with a fraction of the number of followers as on their X account. Clearly, greater engagement (rather than pure follower numbers, many of which may be bots or inactive users) is helping create a dynamic that might lead to a tipping point whereby there is a sudden rush away from X.
Do you think we are at a tipping point? Of course, one can ask about tipping points in both a negative sense (i.,e, an exodus from X) and a positive sense (consolidation of news and policy-oriented views and information at Bluesky)? Or do you think that the ecosystem approach of Threads piggybacking on Instagram will ultimately win out? Alternatively, could X (perhaps combined with Trump’s Truth Social and with the full force of the US Government behind it) somehow reemerge as a dominant player?