The inxodus onto Bluesky noted here last week continues apace: the site’s added a million users a day for more than a week, gradually slowing down from 12 new users a second, per the live counter.
These are not lurkers. Suddenly, the site feels like Twitter circa 2009/2010, when your algorithm-free feed was filled with interesting people sharing ideas, there were no ads, and abuse was in its infancy. People missing in action for the last year or two are popping up; others I’ve wished would move off exTwitter so I could stop following them there have suddenly joined. Mastodon is also seeing an uptick, and (I hear) Threads continues to add users without, for me, adding interest to match…. I doubt this diaspora is all “liberals”, as some media have it – or if they are, it won’t be long before politicians and celebrities note the action is elsewhere and rush to stay relevant.
It takes a long time for a social medium to die if it isn’t killed by a corporation. Even after this week’s bonanza, Bluesky’s entire user base fits inside 5% of exTwitter, which still has around 500 million users as of September, about half of them active daily. What matters most are *posters*, who are about 10% or less of any social site’s user base. When they leave, engagement plummets, as shown in a 2017 paper in Nature.
An example in action: at Statnews, Katie Palmer reports that the science and medical community is adopting Bluesky.
I have to admit to some frustration over this: why not Mastodon? As retro-fun as this week on Bluesky has been, the problem noted here a few weeks ago of Bluesky’s venture capital funding remains. Yes, the company is incorporated as a public benefit company – but venture capitalists want exit strategies and return on investment. That tension looms.
Mastodon is a loose collection of servers that all run the same software, which in turn is written to the open protocol Activity Pub. Gergely Orosz has deep-dive looks at Bluesky’s development and culture; the goal was to write a new open protocol, AT, that would allow Bluesky, similarly, to federate with others. There is already a third-party bit of software, Bridgy, that provides interoperability among Bluesky, any system based on Activity Pub (“the Fediverse”, of which Mastodon is a subset), and the open web (such as blogs). For the moment, though, Bluesky remains the only site running its AT protocol, so the more users Bluesky adds, the more it feels like a platform rather than a protocol. And platforms can change according to the whims of their owners – which is exactly what those leaving exTwitter are escaping. So: why not Mastodon, which doesn’t have that problem?
In an exchange on Bluesky, Palmer said that those who mentioned it said they found Mastodon “too difficult to figure out”.
It can’t be the thing itself; typing and sending varies little. The problem has to be the initial uncertainty about choosing a server. What you really want is for institutions to set up their own, and then you sign up there. For most people that’s far too much heavy lifting. Still, this is what the BBC and the German government have done, and it has a significant advantage in that posting from an address on that server automatically verifies the poster as an authentic staffer. NPR simply found a server and opened an account, like I did when I joined Mastodon in 2019.
All that said, how Mastodon administrators will cope with increasing usage and resulting costs also remains an open question as discussed here last year.
So: some advice as you settle into your new online home:
– Plan for the site’s eventual demise. “On the Internet your home will always leave you” (I have lost the source of this quote). Every site, no matter how big and fast-growing it is now, or how much you all love it…assume that at some point in the future it will either die of outmoded business model (AOL forums); get bought and closed down (Television without Pity, CompuServe, Geocities); become intolerable because of cultural change (exTwitter); or be abandoned because the owner loses interest (countless blogs and comment boards). Plan for that day. Collect alternative means of contacting the people you come to know and value. Build multiple connections.
– Watch the data you’re giving the site. No one in 2007, when I joined Twitter, imagined their thousands of tweets would become fodder for a large language model to benefit one of the world’s richest multi-billionaires.
– If you are (re)building an online community for an organization, own that community. Use social media, by all means, but use it to encourage people to visit the organization’s website, or join its fully-controlled mailing list or web board. Otherwise, one day, when things change, you will have to start over from scratch, and may not even know who your members are or how to reach them.
– Don’t worry too much about the “filter bubble”, as John Elledge writes. Studies generally agree social media users encounter more, and more varied, sources of news than others. As he says, only journalists have to read widely among people whose views they find intolerable (see also the late, great Molly Ivins).
Illustrations: A mastodon by Heinrich Harder (public domain, via Wikimedia).
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
