At the beginning of the year I noted that I’d been on Twitter (now X) for 20 years, and given the cesspool the site has become that was probably enough. I made a post there saying my account was no longer being monitored and logged out / deleted the app off my devices. I made the conscious effort to spend time on BlueSky instead. I didn’t expect this would be a 1:1 swap, but I also didn’t expect a lot of what I observed over the last month or so. Given that, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned, in no particular order:
1. My first and biggest realization was X is almost impossible to read if you aren’t logged in. I hadn’t realized what a closed system the site had become since I was logged in consistently for the last 20 years. Occasionally I’d be sent a post, and more often than not I wouldn’t be able to see it. In the cases where I could see it, I couldn’t see any of the replies. If I wanted to look at the profile of who made the post? Forget it. See the profile of another user tagged in the post? No way. I think a lot of people who use X post things there thinking it’s the best place for the most people to see it, but that’s clearly not the case. It’s much more restrictive than people realize. I’ve always been a vocal advocate of posting things on your own website first, but wow.
Conversely, clicking a link from BlueSky while not being logged in lets you read the full post and comments and click around to accounts easily, unless as I recently learned the person has turned on a preference which blocks people who aren’t logged in. I was surprised how many people have this enabled.
2. What about when logged in? This is likely the best thing – on BlueSky when logged in I saw posts from the people I follow. Most recent first. Picking random people from my following list and looking at their profile showed that I was in fact seeing all their posts. And there were no ads. So this was of course wonderful since currently the experience on X is that you only see some of the posts from people you follow (if X thinks they are interesting) and similarly no matter how many followers you have, X isn’t showing them your posts. You can pay to show it to more of them, and there’s tons of ads clogging up the feed. On X if you want to see what someone posts you have to go to their profile directly, you can’t trust that it’ll be shown to you. So BlueSky definitely won there.
3. However, a lot of conversations on BlueSky are still about how they aren’t using X. This is a pretty common thing in the beginning of any social site, but I admit I was surprised that this far long that’s still such a common theme there. And it isn’t just X, but posting about not using a whole collection of other apps and services, and also guilting/shaming others for using any of those apps and services. People are even making block lists (more on that next) of people who use other services.
4. BlueSky looooves blocking. I continue to see quote-posts of posts I can’t read because the original author has me blocked. I’ve been on BlueSky since the early days but admittedly have not spent a lot of time there until now, so it was curious to me as to why people would have blocked me. Digging into it a little, seems it’s pretty normal for people to see a single post or comment from someone and then add them to super generalized block lists called things like “nft scammers” or “ai apologists” or “Bernie Bros” or “MAGA trolls” or any number of other things and then other people just automatically block everyone on those lists. This is somewhat amusing since I don’t think any of those are accurate classifications for me, some just laughably off base. If you immediately think that creates echo chambers, that’s what I found too.
5. Art. This is a big one. I followed a lot of artists on X. And art galleries and curators and companies and institutions. Lots of art stuff. As such my feed there was very frequently filled with art. Admittedly sometimes too much and it occasionally ventured into spam. I had trouble finding art on BlueSky. Most of the people/companies I follow aren’t there, or if they are they never post. I thought maybe this was a chance to find something new and made a post asking for accounts to follow to surface more art. I got 2 replies. Since then only one of those accounts has posted any art, and they only posted once. Conversely, asking for more art on X would regularly result in hundreds of replies from people who post art and articles about art almost daily. I was reminded that similar to Block Lists people create Starter Packs, lists you can follow to see a bunch of people and went hunting for the art ones. I found some, but was immediately put off as the posts in these weren’t so much “check out my art” as they were “fuck NFTs” and “this art was made by a real human not AI!”
I have a lot more to say on that one, but I think it’ll get rolled into another post I’ve been working on for the last week as it’s more relevant there. Suffice to say, if you can’t talk about art without bashing other artists for completely arbitrary things, you probably don’t have anything interesting to say about art.
6. Questions. Again, on X when I’d reply to someone or ask a public question I usually got some interesting answers. On BlueSky I rarely got a response. Even if I was replying to someone asking for more information about something they were talking about, not a ton of discourse. That’s not universal, there’s some bigger accounts which have been active since the beginning which get tons of replies to anything they post (and perhaps if I had been then someone would be writing that about me) but for me it just felt a bit lonely.
My immediate assumption was this related to the difference in number of active users vs number of followers I have on each. But going by the numbers alone, probably not. Considering there’s no algo to fight and % of followers vs total daily users, every model I plugged the math into said probably 5-6x as many people see my posts on BlueSky as they do on X. So, even if that is only half true, the seeing it vs replying to it ratio is not great.
7. FOMO. I felt like I was missing a lot. Some of that was because of the aforementioned lower engagement and activity from people I’m following, but some of it was because in fact I was missing a lot. I checked, and yeah, lots of things were happening that I’d have known about passively had I been on X. Even still being in various telegram groups and Discords (and not accounting for the extra effort of checking dozens of places rather than just one) I often found myself learning about things days later, missing conversations and lacking context. It was kind of shocking, since again for a very long time I’ve not needed to try and know what’s happening, I just know because I’m surrounded by it happening. It was a bit concerning how much of that was cut off by just not having X open in a side window.
8. I forgot what 8 was for.
9. It’s changing? Maybe? BlueSky users don’t have a monopoly on hating on X, X users themselves are pretty adept at it as well. A lot of people hate the algo, the bots, the trolls, the farming, Elon, etc.. and want to go somewhere else but for many of the reasons listed above feel like they have no options. At some point in the last few weeks I noticed people were still tagging me and messaging me on X, so I posted a “reminder this account isn’t being monitored, find me on other social sites” kind of thing and the responses were pretty interesting – lots of “there are other sites?” And “I wish people didn’t hate NFTs on BlueSky” and many other variations of those. So I think if there was some real concerted effort to get art people from X onto BlueSky maybe a bunch would go?
10. I love thinking in all or nothing terms, but 6 weeks in I may have to admit that’s not reasonable for me at this point. If my “day job” didn’t revolve around digital art as much as it does right now that wouldn’t likely be as hard. So it’s probably more of a reduced usage and continual push to get people to go elsewhere, which also requires an elsewhere people want to and feel welcome going. So we’ll see, but that’s where it is at the moment.