What would you say at Twitter’s funeral?
That’s the question my collaborators and I asked over 1,000 people on social media as part of a broader research project on Twitter migration. Responses ranged from the profane to the poetic, but one common theme was that despite its significant flaws, Twitter at its best was truly great … until it wasn’t.
“The world is a better place for it having existed, and a better place now that it’s gone.”
“It takes so little to destroy so much.”
“I will miss it for what it could be in its best moments, but I will be happy that we can finally move on to healthier spaces.”
For many, it was time to leave in the hopes of finding greener pastures.
Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now branded as X, in October 2022, there have been reports of mass migration from the platform, and much ink was spilled – including some by me, a researcher who studies online communities – speculating where those users might land.
The decentralized social network Mastodon attracted a lot of early attention, gaining a significant influx of users in the months following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. In July 2023, Meta’s microblogging platform Threads gained 30 million users in its first day. Other Twitter alternatives appeared in 2023, some of which have chugged along with relatively small user bases, while others have already shut down. But these days, all the buzz seems to be about Bluesky.
Looking for the familiar
Bluesky was created in 2019 as a research project within Twitter led by then-CEO Jack Dorsey. It eventually severed ties with Twitter and became an independent company following Musk’s acquisition. The goal with Bluesky was to build a decentralized standard for social media that Twitter could eventually adopt. In that way, Bluesky is comparable to Mastodon in that they both allow for the creation of different servers that interact, and users can move their data and network between servers.
But what does all this mean for your experience on Bluesky? If you are confused by – or just don’t care about – centralized versus decentralized social media, Bluesky won’t seem very different. It looks and feels a lot like Twitter. Nearly all of Bluesky currently operates from a single server, bsky.social, which means that you don’t have to choose a server when you sign up and your experience is contained there. Though Bluesky provides the option for users to host their own server and therefore store and control their own data, most users will experience what they’re accustomed to on traditional, centralized social media.
A tech analyst explains how Bluesky began and how it’s gaining momentum.
My previous research on platform migration revealed how leaving a platform requires both a compelling reason and an immediate viable alternative. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was a compelling reason for many…
