Some key excerpts:
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all
For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.
After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.
In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X.
As each wave departs X, the site gradually becomes less valuable to those who stay, prompting a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.
Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social.
Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience.
This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them. The fringier, vanguard segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.
Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.
The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling.
All of these stories I feel the same way: moving to another centralized privately owned platform is stupid.
Eh, I’ll take it. Bluesky’s learned some lessons from the past, for what it’s worth. It has more than a few features that make the network lock-in less intense, so while I fully expect it to enshittify, I do think it’ll be less severe of an affair than it was for Twitter.
What I’m more upset about is Threads. I can’t think of anything redeeming about that place.
Bluesky is supposedly working on decentralisation, but yeah, I agree, especially since Mastodon is already there. Normies are just somehow very turned off by too much Linux talk, even though free software is part of the answer to keeping our society free and stopping monopolies from forming.
Even if bluesky somehow finishes decentralization its still fundamentally incompatible with the fediverse. In addition I doubt that itll become truly open source.
I mean, if they can somehow come up with something better than activitypub, that would be great, from what I read it’s actually not that efficient. But yeah, decentralisation is not something you can just tack on, so I’m sceptical too, especially since they’re trying to raise VC money, which is not something you do when you want to build an open protocol.
Decentralization is inherently inefficient. Efficiency is a double-edged sword, though. One which our modern, business focused culture actively tries to ignore the self-facing blade of.
Bluesky will never be fully decentralized. The DID needs a central authority like DNS. Its architecture is distributed though.
Ideally the DID stuff is put into a foundation, and once the open source the other components anyone who can handle the fire hose can join.
unless i’m missing something, activitypub also needs a centralized authority like dns. That’s just how domain names work
“Like DNS” there is an analogy. And DNS is actually a distributed system.
Imagine if every web DNS had to go through Facebook. That’s how all of the ATproto traffic works. It’s all funneled through Bluesky’s servers.
Not strictly speaking. Bluesky supports did:web as well as did:plc, and with any luck they’ll add more decentralized methods