Mass eXodus and Finding a New Microblogging Home

I'm sure many of you have seen the multitudes of articles discussing the droves of people leaving X (formerly Twitter) for what many hope to be brighter social media pastures. I am one of them. There have been many instances since Elon Musk was forced to buy the company that have led to spikes in users leaving the platform, including the most recent election and the upcoming changes to its Grok AI and the data that it will be supplied with, regardless of what the user may want.

I soft quit X quite some time ago when Musk took over and cut the content moderation team, joining many others who were reading the writing on the wall when it came to conspiracy theories, crazed political ideas, and rampant racism crashing over the site like a crazed psychotic waterfall of drama that has only gotten worse since then, so I wiped my account and set it up with links to some other microblogging services I had been checking out, mainly Mastodon (for which I had an account but let it waste away) and Threads. I had heard of Bluesky, but had little knowledge or interest in it at the time due to the involvement of Jack Dorsey.

I eventually gave up on Mastodon for various reasons, including initially overly complicated feature usage and account portability, which ActivityPub (the federated/decentralized protocol) Mastodon works on that it was supposed to solve. In fairness, it has been addressed in updates since then. After a botched migration to another server that aligned more with my interests, that was it for me, and I deleted my account.

So once again, left adrift of a place to post all my random thoughts, as I mainly use Facebook for family posts and life updates, I turned to Threads in mid-2023, and it was a breath of fresh air and very much felt like Twitter originally did. I posted regularly about my interests, enjoyed not seeing a million ads everywhere, and gained a small following within my own interests and communities, but eventually let it waste away again. I sit at 34 followers at the time of this post as my account has both languished and, spoiler, I've moved to Bluesky about a week ago. Not only that, but I honestly think I just lost interest for the very reason I switched to Threads in the first place. I wanted old Twitter back, but at the time I didn't realize I didn't want just old Twitter; I wanted something better, with more control, and honestly, being tied into the Meta ecosystem of Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads made me a bit too nervous about being reliant on one company for my online identity and services.

I had kept Bluesky in my thoughts but never genuinely considered it until I struck up a conversation with a friend of mine who couldn't sing enough praises for it. I was also sent this great thread by Daniel Huckmann, and Jack Dorsey had left the board about six months ago, so that made me feel a lot better, as my friend told me about some of the features and ways he was able to really drill down into the site's functions and tailor it for himself. Okay, I decided to sign up about a week ago and instantly fell in love with the service. It gives me so much control over what I want and, more importantly, don't want to see, and I do not mean just muting/blocking words. I've taken advantage of the moderation lists, the ability to have custom (curated or not) feeds, and even being able to pick and choose in what order I want to view them in. Aside from just muting words and tags, I can even use their moderation services and either block, hide, or warn me for content that ranges from misinformation to engagement farming.

On a side note the protocol that Bluesky runs on (AT Protocol) which is also a decentralized system, is slowly being adopted into other services, such as blogging. You can take a look at one called WhiteWind and follow them on Bluesky.

I'm sure there is even more I haven't discovered yet, but I realize this is exactly what I wanted—not just old Twitter, but a better, old Twitter. And as of right now, this is exactly what Bluesky is providing to me. You can follow me here.