Just the week after the Presidential election, millions of X/Twitter users decided that they’ve had enough of the platform’s extreme political messages and Elon Musk publicly supporting Donald Trump. Now, millions of users have decided to shut down their accounts and flee other platforms, such as Bluesky.
After Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, the platform was flooded with misinformation, conspiracy theories, far-right posts, spam bots, and thousands of posts supporting Donald Trump. Users viewed the platform as a strategy to advance Musk’s far right agenda and decided to flee to other and friendlier platforms.
Just the week after the election, Bluesky told Vox that 2.5 million people had joined the platform.
“I can guarantee that no bluesky team members will be sitting with a presidential candidate tonight and giving them direct access to control what you see online,” the official Bluesky account posted on X, referring to Musk’s close ties with Trump.
Bluesky is another alternative from Twitter, just as Threads or Mastodon, but it has the advantage that it began as a project by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, so it has a familiar feeling that certainly the X users miss. While it has far less users than Threads, it appears that users like this familiarity, in addition that the platform is open source and it doesn’t have an algorithm mandating what type of posts you see.
Users have said the best part of Bluesky is that it feels like a community trying to build something new, instead of a place where a billionaire dictates what people see.
“To me the biggest difference between Bluesky and every other social media platform I’ve ever been on is the close relationship between the user base and the (quite small!) team of developers,” journalist and longtime Bluesky shitposter Miles Klee told Vox.
“When people first joined, it was very bare bones, and the devs pursued new features according to what they heard users wanted. Because a lot of people were looking to escape the toxicity of X, that meant they ended up prioritizing safety and accessibility,” Klee said. “On Bluesky, many users feel that they’re building something new together, and that gives them a feeling of ownership, control, community.”
Many users have seen X on decline, specifically because of Musk’s actions. For example, the platform was banned in Brazil because the millionaire refused to pay fees, making millions of users flee to other platforms. In October the platform announced that it would allow third-party AI companies to scrape all user data. Most recently, Musk announced that blocking an user will no longer prevent them from seeing your content.
In addition, many companies stopped advertising on the platform because their ads appeared along neo-nazi content.
Ultimately, Musk weaponizing the platform to support Trump was the thing that led users not only to flee the platform but to delete their accounts.
With more and more deciding to leave Twitter, Bluesky users feel optimistic about the future.
“Every influx of users brings with it more voices, some with good intent and some with bad intent, but Bluesky is responsive to the people who use it in ways that encourage people to stick around,” Bluesky Maura Quint told Vox. “When you compare that to sites where white nationalists organize mass attacks, spending money lets anyone drown out real discussion, and mass disinformation spreads at the whim of a billionaire, Bluesky is clearly the place to be.”
