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Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter two years ago, those who despise his evolving mix of predatory trolling, stunted emotional development and right-wing extremism have been hoping for an alternative. There was “Post”; Meta got into the act with “Threads”; another entity of at first uncertain origins actually got its start with one of Twitter’s former CEOs, Jack Dorsey. That was Bluesky. There was also Mastodon, a sort of Linux of social media networks. Part of the problem there was that you may not be familiar enough with Linux to understand the analogy. And if you do, you’re part of a potential community not nearly big enough to sustain a mass adoption social media platform. Each in succession thoroughly failed to dislodge or even make much of a dent in Twitter’s disordered and Frankensteinian dominance. It’s the power of network effects. Everyone can want to leave (or at least a big chunk of users can want that) and yet everyone is simultaneously trapped. It’s a collective action problem.
But then something seemed to shift all at once in the immediate aftermath of the November election. Bluesky had built a small but real community since its incremental launch more than a year earlier. Its growth, which had been gradual through the summer and into the fall, suddenly surged more or less immediately after the election. The site now has just under 23 million users and has been adding a million a day on some days since November 5th.
Now at this point you may be thinking: “Josh, I’m here to get my footing on our unfolding national crisis, not hear about the latest Twitter clone.” But I want you to hang on a minute and stick with me for this one. Because this is actually part of that bigger story. I don’t have much patience for niche social media stories either.
Now back to our discussion.
Let’s go back to the collective action problem.
I spend an obscene amount of time on Twitter. A decent amount of that is tied to underlying personality defects, a barely concealed pugilism and inability to let people have the last word. But Twitter’s real use case for me has always been as a source of news. People constantly either urge or demand that I leave the platform out of some point of principle or to not underwrite Elon Musk’s bottom line or whatever else. I don’t think like that, and don’t do performative defiance or declarations on principle or whatever. For two years I have wanted the entirety of Twitter to cease to exist, crater into oblivion. But until it did, there was this thing I need and that’s where it was. Even in Twitter’s degraded, Musk-era form, by carefully curating lists, I am able to get updated on real news on the subjects of most interest to me very quickly. Absent that, a social network is of very little use to me. I’d already been spending a bit more time on Bluesky over the past few months. But in roughly the week after the election, suddenly that thing I just described was there too: a critical mass of the people who, when organized together, give me that real-time access to what’s happening. Because of that, I’ve largely left Twitter and now spend the time I used to spend there on Bluesky — not to make a statement but because it has most of that thing I need. I check in on Twitter too. But my current use is about 10 to 1 in Bluesky’s favor, about the inverse of what it was a month ago.
Most users don’t have the professional need for this kind of social network that I do. But some form of what I’m describing is why most other people are moving over too: a critical mass that makes it a real competitor to Twitter. Enough of the people you’re there to hear from or be heard by are there.
Before going further, why did this happen at all and why in a rush just after the election? First of all, it’s not just politics Twitter. Every major media publication has run some story about liberals wanting to retreat to a safe “bubble.” This, frankly, is as tired as your standard “Dems in disarray” laziness. Twitter is actually lots of different communities. Moving all around the same time aren’t just politics Twitter but Black Twitter, sports Twitter and a bunch of others. The reality is that Musk’s management of the space has vastly degraded its basic functionality and made it increasingly toxic even for people who aren’t that focused on politics. But clearly the election was some pivot point and that’s about politics. So why did this happen now?
My sense is that it’s a couple things in tandem. One is that Musk’s increasingly direct and over-the-top role as part of the Trump campaign, almost like a co-president, was just finally too much for people. He was making the whole space into a Trump propaganda engine. Trump winning the election was a breaking point. At the same time, you had a lot of people who were tired of Twitter but as long as the election was going on they stayed to find out what was happening in the election. No election, no refreshing Twitter. This happened just as Bluesky was developing enough momentum to offer a potential alternative.
What this leaves still unanswered is the movement of communities, at pretty much the same time, not as tightly tied to politics. I don’t have as clear a sense of why and how that happened. But it did. With Black Twitter, the adjacency and overlap with politics speaks for itself. With sports and other communities, less so. Perhaps it’s a mix of a heavily politicized society and Musk’s increasingly untrammeled behavior. Or perhaps it’s something simpler: late 2024 Twitter is a lot like living in the home of an emotionally stunted, middle aged egomaniac with more money than he knows what to do with. And I think we all know what that home looks like on the inside.
When I realized this was real and not just Bluesky hype I’ve been caught up in is when I heard that Meta and its “Threads” Twitter competitor were starting to roll out features and changes to deal with competition from Bluesky. Those are largely tied to allowing users to opt out of some aspects of its algorithm. I was even more interested when I saw this report this morning that Chinese state media is concerned about Bluesky’s rapid growth relative to Twitter. Like other state actors, China has invested huge resources into amplifying its voice on Twitter, Facebook and other networks — most of all on TikTok, which is a Chinese company with close ties to the government.
The key issue here is the algorithm. That’s what makes this potentially more than just another story about Bluesky emerging as a rival to Twitter. After all, the Chinese state has a lot of resources. So, fine, what’s the problem? They’ll just build up on Bluesky, right? But again, the algorithm is the key.
Twitter was never a particularly large social network. It was totally dwarfed in the old days by Facebook. And it wasn’t profitable. That’s the reason Musk was able to buy it. What made it important and worth buying was it packed way more influence over media and communications than its size suggested. A big factor underlying Bluesky’s recent growth is that its use of algorithms is very light. The big move Meta/”Threads” just made to compete was — breaking all Meta business doctrine — allowing users a bit more ability to opt out of its algorithm. There’s a reason that’s Meta business doctrine. Social media platforms harvest engagement like mines harvest coal from the ground. More engagement, more money. That’s the role of the algorithm. It’s the drilling machinery of social media platform wealth. The pre-Musk Twitter absolutely used algorithms but not as effectively or with as expansive a social grid as Facebook. That’s why it was never that successful as a business.
Bluesky is trying to make that light use of algorithms its secret sauce. And it’s an open question whether that’s going to be possible since, as I said, that’s where the money is. We’ll see on that front. But here’s where this comes back to the role of political and state actor propaganda. In that Semafor piece I linked above and in the underlying article it builds on, they talk about the core issue in modern political communications. The algorithms, which are the central profit drivers of all contemporary social media platforms, are also what makes them so useful for state actors. As that article argues, Bluesky’s light algorithmic structure may make it harder for China, Russia and everyone else operating on these platforms (very much including domestic actors) to turn it to their purposes.
That’s interesting.
I’m not trying to get all Empire and Rebel Alliance about this. The platforms have hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal. And they have all the smart people money can buy to maintain the dominance of their commanding-heights companies’ power. On the other side of the equation, Bluesky’s current path of running a social network with only a light use of algorithms has a pretty obvious problem built into it: where does the money come from? Even the recent rush to Bluesky has that network effect tipping point dimension to it. For the moment, if you want off Twitter and its toxicity, Bluesky is offering enough to make it plausible. But to sustain the movement it will probably have to keep growing. If some critical mass of the power users people want to hear from decide Bluesky doesn’t have quite enough juice, the whole thing could roll back in Twitter’s direction. Meta’s “Threads” is of course also in the mix, though I think Meta’s corporate reflexes and the growing disenchantment with platform oligarchs will likely make that a hard sell.
Still, billionaire oligarchs and the tech platforms which drive a good bit of their wealth — and also give them outsized political power and a potential stranglehold on political communications — are all key elements of our political moment. So these techie developments are worth keeping track of.