Twitter (“X”) or Bluesky?

November 13, 2024 • 10:15 am

I noticed last week that the followers of my Twitter account had dropped by several hundred, and then I realized that a lot of people are going to the alternative site Bluesky, presumably because they don’t like Elon Musk because he gave a lot of dosh to Trump (and now has a job in the Trump Administration).

Matthew went from “X” to Bluesky a while back, and has been telling me to move as well. He said this:

People aren’t leaving (just) because they hate Musk – the site [X] doesn’t work. Posts aren’t seen, even if you follow people your timeline gets swamped with blue tick reply guy crap. To see what people post you have to go onto their timeline. And fewer and fewer people are there. You have 40,000 followers [JAC: it’s 36,400] – how many interactions with your tweets? How many of those followers are either a) human or b) active? And – though this isn’t why you use it – the fun component [like the tweet he sent about fat cheetah cubs]) has disappeared from X completely. The Guardian has stopped posting there. User numbers are dropping. Not a useful or fun place to be any more.

Yes, there appear to be advantages of Bluesky, which seem to include these:

  1. Everybody seems to be going there, though I haven’t done any systematic checking, as I don’t formally follow anyone on Twitter
  2. You can directly embed the posts (they are apparently called “skeets”) into my website without going through the complicated process of embedding Tweets
  3. It appears to  have more fun stuff on it, though I like a mixture of fun and serious stuff (e.g., animals and politics)

The downsides seem less important, but include two:

  1. How do I get all the people who follow me now to go there? I suppose by telling them on X.
  2. I am old and lazy, and it takes a bit of effort—though not much—to open an account.

I don’t particularly feel compelled to leave X just because Elon Musk runs it, as I have no strong feelings about that, but I suppose I’ll move after I check Bluesky. But I wonder about readers’ experience with these two cites. Please give your take below (not advice on whether to move, but the relative advantages of the two sites). Which site do you use or occupy? Are there any other advantages, issues or features that I don’t know about?

Eric Bailey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

46 thoughts on “Twitter (“X”) or Bluesky?”

  2. I follow users on BlueSky if possible, if some special process is required it’d be handy to post it I guess.

    The relative volumes of material and rates would be interesting to know for Mastodon etc. as well.

    You know God came back to eXtwitter – Hallelujah!

  3. I recall reports of everyone leaving X for Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter. Now Bluesky is the beneficiary of Twitter exodus reports

    You can compare the two here:
    • https://mastodon-analytics.com/
    Looks like if you pinch on the image to zoom out, you can see a label that says “Elon buys Twitter” on ~Oct 27, 2022.

    • https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

    Looks like Bluesky has more users, ~15M vs ~9m. The daily actives are hard to compare since Bluesky’s breaks out the daily actives into “likers”, “posters”, and “followers.”

  4. Blueskye has an advantage over X. It has a public web interface. This allows users to view posts on Bluesky without being logged in with an account.

    2. I bet they’ll change if their membership grows enough. A new site has to offer perks.

      I have an X account but I only go there to view tweets that someone else has referenced.

      I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other.

  5. I know little of BlueSky other than it’s the place to go if you are sick of all the right wing lies and bigotry. This worries me, it sounds like the formation of an echo chamber. I’m a big proponent of viewpoint diversity in any discussion forum. I’ve seen the lack of it lead to ideological drift.

    What I personally know about X is that it’s different from Twitter in one significant respect. When I first joined several years ago I followed several gender critical accounts, which of course introduced me to others. I watched people (mostly women) get suspended and/or banned for writing things like “women don’t have penises “ or “you can’t change sex.” It wasn’t predictable. You might get away with it; you might not. It depended on whether the Hate Speech Nannies noticed you. It seemed like they were especially likely to notice (or enjoy banning) large, popular, articulate accounts.

    If BlueSky is ensuring that “hate speech” won’t worry its users again, that’s a firm nope from me.

  7. I joined twitter for news (I never post) about culture and politics. I still get lots of that. Blooski seemed like a crying room for post-Musk twitter users, and the feed still looks and feels like pre-2022 Resistance twitter. Lots of self-congratulatory progressives, lots of pro-trans “be kind” content, lots of reminders about how racist America is. I’m sure there will also be lots of good useful content but so far I can’t be bothered to look for it. Could be convinced to try harder.

    1. Some wag on X said that Bluesky was like being in a faculty meeting, but different in that you had to read it.

  8. 1) It’s wrong to say that X “doesn’t work”, it works just fine. If you use the “following” tab you see people you follow and don’t see people you don’t follow. If you use the “for you” tab (where an algorithm selects what you see), then, yes, you see other stuff also. Since the algorithm takes account of what you interact with, you can curate what you see (for example by using the three-dots menu at top-right of a Tweet). If you don’t want this algorithm-driven experience then simply stick to the “following” tab.

    2) Twitter has about 50 times higher overall usage than the alternatives such as Bluesky and Threads. If you want to be part of the mainstream use Twitter, though some people might find a niche on Bluesky more to their liking.

    3) I see no evidence that “fewer and fewer people are” on Twitter. This seems to be mostly wishful thinking from people who dislike Musk (or who have departed for Bluesky and want to drum-up activity there). The Guardian is leaving because they don’t want to be on a platform where non-Guardian views can also be aired, not because there’s any lack of people on Twitter.

    4) There are periodic purges of bots on Twitter, so a drop in follower count could be for this reason. (Twitter is indeed worse for bots than the others, simply because the others are too small for it to be worthwhile for the spam-botters to infiltrate them.)

    2. I care what the Guardian thinks about X or Musk. They’re so far left as to be largely unreadable.

  9. There’s no real reason to leave Twitter. Elon bought it in 2022 and people insisted he would run it so badly it would literally shut down within weeks or months. That obviously did not happen, and it’s meaningfully improved in some ways. For example, previously a blue check meant your account was “verified” as being a notable person but people complained (rightfully) forever that the verification was a black box that appeared biased in multiple ways. Elon replaced it instead with a system where you just pay to get “verified” (no black box) and it has material benefits for people who pay (e.g. allows them to show up more often if you follow them). It can be annoying to disproportionately see posts by people who basically paid to get there but it’s a sensible decision on Elon’s part, the website has to make money somehow. It’s better than the previous system anyways. Another example is that banning someone now makes it so they can’t reply to your posts, but they can still see them (previously it blocked both). That makes more sense as the previous system allowed someone to slander others and simply block them to prevent them from seeing the slander. In any case, the current train of people leaving is once again being hysterical, and there’s actually published research showing that alternative sites (e.g. Bluesky and Mastodon) did not meaningfully increase their activity despite Twitter losing some of its activity.

  10. A quick gander turns up a fraction of users in one session saying BlueSky “feels safe” or “sane”… and then what’s this… PZ laying down personal judgements on PCC(E), Laura Helmuth “I managed to [..] laugh at Jerry for being pathetic”,…

    Soooo…. make of that what one will.

  11. I follow a lot of people on twitter but – funny enough – rarely you. I figure reading WEIT and all my fellow loudmouths in the comments every day informs enough. For the public not in firmly in the WEIT camp though many seem to read and retweet your tweets. So twitter/x is worth it for you. I often think I should do it to extend the reach of my column but I’m lazy.

    I wouldn’t worry about the extra effort of chasing malcontents who defect to bluesky. Truth social for leftists I think.

    Oy! — You could use the time you’d otherwise waste at bluesky by re-introducing the photos of readers section – with pics and short bios of us. I always liked that section even before I was featured there personally. hehehe.
    https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/

    Just my two cents.

    D.A.
    NYC

    best,
    D.A.
    NYC

  12. Many GC people set up accounts in GETTR when we were permabanned from Twitter, but since Musk restored free speech and lifted our bans, many of us have returned to X, and I don’t even look at GETTR now. I didn’t like it at all, it was very right wing. I don’t ever want to exist in a bubble, but a lot of stuff on GETTR at the time was very extreme and you couldn’t even have a rational conversation.

    If there was a consensus among gender critical people to move to bluesky I might consider having another account there, but I don’t think I would delete X because I’m connected with the independence movement there.

  13. I’ve found one big advantage of paying for an X blue check is unlimited access to Grok AI, which is playing an increasingly important role in my professional and personal life.

    Elon has said that he wants Grok to be maximally truth-seeking, with minimal political bias. I believe him. In the run-up to the election, I performed several Grok queries that contradicted Musk’s claims on immigration and ballot fraud.

  14. I follow people on Mastodon to increase my exposure to the far left. If you like whining leftists, Mastodon can’t be beat.

  16. I’m on both of them (and also on Threads), and honestly, my experience of all of them is very much the same–but then again I have never even considered using any of these sites as sources of news or information or current events or anything serious. Even with the doubling of the character count per tweet to 240 (I think) back in the day, I considered it ludicrous to think of Twitter (or even Facebook) as a place where any serious discourse should be expected. Mostly I just look for humorous memes or short math puzzles or reply when someone asks something like “Who is your favorite classic rock guitarist” or “which of these horror movies is your favorite”. That seems about the right speed for all these places.

  17. I’m fully with the esteemed Professor Cobb. During the early stages of Covid Twitter was a place where I went for intelligent comment. Over the last little while it has become a place where unpleasant lunatics spout nonsense, pornbots roam freely, and intelligent comment is hard to spot amongst the noise. I followed people like Professor Cobb and Adam Kucharski there, but they are bailing out (https://kucharski.substack.com/p/science-social-media-is-dead) and I’m trying bluesky. I still have the odd pleasant interaction on Twitter – Margaret Kerr, the wife of the legendary NZ mathematician/physicist Roy Kerr posts on art and music, and Oliver Johnson, professor of maths at Bristol University, is always worth a read, but the bright parts are hard to spot amongst the rising tide of toxic sludge.

    1. “… the bright parts are hard to spot amongst the rising tide of toxic sludge”.

      I’m not sure what the problem is. If you simply use the “following” tab you see only posts from those you have chosen to follow, and don’t see any “toxic sludge” (unless you’ve deliberately “followed” people posting it). Hence you can pretty much get the experience you want on Twitter, simply by choosing who to follow.

      1. Maybe that was the case at one time. However, I select “following” and, though it does make a difference, most of the stuff is not from the people I follow.

        1. Interesting. Just to report (I’ve just checked), my “following” tab gives me only posts by people I’ve followed (plus posts by others that have been re-posted by people I’ve followed; plus some adverts). I’m not sure why this would be different for you.

  18. Having spent some time examining life on Bluesky, I’m left with the sense that its overarching tone is self-congratulatory, resembling the tone of those “In this house we believe…” signs that dot the lawns of the more virtuous academic neighborhoods. Bluesky would therefore likely suit the sensibilities of those seeking a safe space from the open marketplace of opinion.

  20. I just went to bsky.app and scanned the main page. Quite the echo chamber. Nothing dissenting at all. If that’s where all the Democrats move to, then good luck in 2028; they’ll miss the mark again when it comes to common sense public opinion on issues the opinions Americans agree on. On the other hand, a lot of people love to virtue signal by publicly trashing Trump and the Republicans, so it looks great if that’s what you’re into.

    One question: does BSKY have community notes? I really love that feature on X.

  21. Good luck with Bluesky. As far as I can tell, it’s basically left-wing twitter from 2020. On Bluesky, the Cass Report is known by everyone to be debunked, and indigenous knowledge is always right about everything and critical thinking about it is bigotry. Similar on every other bit of left-progressive doctrine I can think of.

    That said, many of the classic science accounts are there so that part is OK, but on the ideological topics, probably you’d be talking into the void. Maybe if the skeptics of these things all formed a group of some kind it would be OK – you could be the ringleader!

    1. There is that. OTOH, if the usual mataurangaballs suspects, aka the “New Zealand Association of Scientists”, hadn’t gathered there to whine, I’d have remained ignorant of the heartening signs at the Royal Society of NZ now that Dame Jane Harding has instituted a governance review.

  22. My unrequested thoughts: Don’t leave X! All that will do is signal Leftist bonafides!!! Do join Blusesky in addition to X.

  25. I would not follow you to BlueSky. I would not open a BlueSky account. The last thing I want to be in is a left-wing echo chamber.

    I feel we all owe Elon Musk a debt of gratitude for removing the left-wing yoke from Twitter.

  26. Social media is another form of online video gaming. Nowadays, a gamer has to be on social media. Many on sm never game or have gamed (the older folk) but it’s the same feeling of addictive amygdala or hypothalamus stimulation whatever the age. Once I gave up video gaming many years ago, I forwent it’s burgeoning little brother, social media. Now it’s a naive stance, I know. Just like getting rid of plastic. Though social media is much easier to avoid than plastic.

    For what it’s worth, my answer is neither.

  27. For the moment BlueSky is a political echo chamber, very much like Gab is, just on the other side of the political axis. That’s all I have to say. What you do is your choice.

  28. Many people I respect, and follow, are moving to Bluesky, and I wouldn’t want to lose their insight, so I’m using both at the moment. I suppose we’ll just have to see where the chips fall.

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