BitDepth#1487
Mark Lyndersay
ALL THE buzz in social media has been about the 'x-odus' from the platform formerly known as Twitter in the wake of the US presidential election and the role that its owner, Elon Musk, visibly played during the campaign.
Musk didn't even bother trying to hide his gaming of the X algorithms to favour whatever he posted.
Weeks after the election, arbitrary Musk posts still jump to the top of the X feed. Given the defection of moderate voices from the platform, it's hard to even gauge whether the increase in hard right conservative posts, offensive declarations and trolling are even attributable to the algorithm anymore, it just seems to be what's left.
The chief beneficiary of the movement seems to be Bluesky, where posts almost doubled between August and September, then came close to doubling again by mid-November.
Prior to this, it was a ghost town, not too different from the earliest days of Twitter.
Microblogging, the unique mix of chat, posts, link exposure and conversations that Twitter brought to social media, didn't immediately find an audience after the service launched in 2006.
I joined just over a year after it went live, in September 2007, and it was…quiet.
This was the early days of social media, when Hi5 and MySpace were a thing and nobody had any idea how all-consuming and influential online 'friendships' would become.
But there was something intriguing about Twitter. The 256-character limit demanded clarity and brevity and minimal punctuation.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey began Bluesky as an experimental protocol within the company. In 2022, after Musk acquired Twitter, the ties between the companies were severed.
Development on the project, which uses a new domain name-based handle system managed by the open communication AT Protocol, began in earnest with the goal of creating a minimum viable system.
Dorsey left the Bluesky board in May.
Bluesky hit its current high of 23 million users faster than expected, but it's way behind X, which has 318 million users and Threads, with 275 million.
The vibrancy of the recent surge in stats is captured admirably online in charts mapping Bluesky's post count and author statistics (bsky.jazco.dev/stats).
The vibe on Bluesky, once you begin to explore its customisable filters and unique starter packs, is more user focused as a social experience than either X or Threads.
The problems with X are likely to be endemic, but so are the issues with Threads, which finds Meta again unable to let go of the lure of a controlling algorithm.
A Threads feed quickly begins to feel like a Facebook feed, with dissociative irrelevance and the powerful feel of machine oversight. Meta's efforts to guide Threads only serves to unravel the potential of its tailoring.
Meta continues its dominance on sheer numbers, each of its products creating an ecosystem that binds users into the others. If you're on Facebook, it's pointless trying to ignore Messenger and, eventually, exploring Instagram. Getting to Thread
