Social Media Microblogging etc.
As others have pointed out, the site formerly known as Twitter is a Nazi bar now.
To be quite clear, this was a problem that a lot of people recognized early on. Even under the “stewardship” of the prior regime, the inconsistent and lax moderation allowed parts of the service to thrive as a hive of wretched scum and villainy. The arrival of the world’s most divorced man turned a gradual disintegration into a powerdive. I, personally, had stuck around for a couple of reasons:
- Having joined in 2006, as user number 3700-something, I’d been around a lot longer than that insufferable shithead, and the way he’d been mismanaging it since convincing some of the world’s worst people to financially back the takeover made me feel I had a good chance of outlasting his ownership.
- I’m part of a few online fellowships (notably, the online fandom of Everton Football Club) that had never managed to herd their respective cats into migrating to another space.
It’s easy to say now that the “last straw” for many people was the very prominent role Musk and the site played in possibly fucking U.S. democracy for decades in the 2024 election cycle, but in reality the real prompt was the good old network effects — Xitter became sufficiently bad and the barrier to alternatives became sufficiently low so that a large cohort could move en masse.
The big winner appears to have been Bluesky. Mere months ago, it seemed that their exceptionally slow rollout had ceded all momentum to Meta’s Threads. The problem with Threads, though (at least for me) was the general Meta ick that the service exudes. The timeline is loaded with algorithmic spoo and engagement bait, and it just doesn’t feel like a place to have an intelligent conversation about anything.
Like a lot of geeks, I’d established a presence in the Fediverse (a/k/a Mastodon) early on, but it’s become clear that the non-geeks were never going to follow us over there in sufficient numbers for network effects to take hold. It was going to need to be something that felt more like Twitter from a UI and onboarding standpoint.
Over the past week, I’ve watched as Everton FC fans have migrated to Bluesky, seemingly in the blink of an eye. Anecdotally, it seems the same thing has happened among all sorts of online interest groups. Critical mass happened faster than I could have imagined.
All this is to say — please add me on Bluesky.