When we last spoke about the looming death Twitter (X), I wrote that “nowhere else has emerged to fill the void”. After this week, that no longer seems quite so true. In the past fortnight, millions of users have jumped ship to the decentralised microblogging platform BlueSky. It’s topped the charts in the social media sections of the app stores. It’s had write-ups everywhere from Bloomberg to Vox to the Telegraph to USA Today, with search-optimised headlines like (this from the Independent) “What is Blueksy and why are people leaving X to sign up?”. This is exactly the sort of coverage that most apps can only dream of, and is likely to have driven the numbers even higher. On Thursday, the platform topped 15 million users, up 50 per cent in a little over a month, causing it to temporarily crash. The outage got coverage on the BBC, too.
The trigger for all this, of course, has been the electoral consummation of the bromance between the world’s richest toddler and president-elect Donald Trump. Since buying Twitter and rebranding it in a manner strangely reminiscent of a teenage boy painting his bedroom black, Elon Musk has been doing everything he can to make it a hostile environment for anyone to the left of Mitt Romney. He removed the old system of verification; throttled views on any post with links, thus undermining the site’s value as an aggregator; and reportedly forced content from paying users and himself into everyone’s feeds.
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