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.
It will be interesting to see what happens as they follow their victims over. Right now, people seem to be experiencing Bluesky as a breath of fresh air, and are attributing it to things like block lists (which, yeah, that’s a good idea, and one that we’ve been asking for for a long while), but a big part of it is just that the ratio of trolls to liberals is way lower right now. They’ll figure out how to break through the algorithm eventually, and around the block lists.
And when that happens, Twitter’s going to bleed out rapidly as the fashy mouth breathers show up to flex over how they cannot be stopped. Because, yeah, there’s nothing keeping them on Twitter once their victims are gone.
I think (/hope) trolls are going to have a pretty hard time gaining traction on Bluesky. As you’ve mentioned, the block lists are quite effective; but also the lack of algorithm helps too. No matter how many likes/reskeets an offensive skeet gets, I will never see it unless someone I follow specifically reskeets it themselves.
With this in mind, most people seeing the trolls’ posts will likely only be the trolls themselves. Of course they can hop into the comments of a popular skeet; but once they are blocked by the original poster, their skeet becomes removed for everybody.
From what I can tell, the enhanced moderation tools combined with the followed-only feed should make being a troll on Bluesky much harder…
Are they really using the term “reskeet?”
It certainly paints a very specific mental image.
That’s somehow worse than Mastodon’s toots.
That is really the term. Of course, every time a new wave of users join, they always say they’ll never call them “skeets,” but they usually change their mind in time.
In my personal opinion, I actually really appreciate them being called “skeets.” It kind of serves as a reminder that they are not to be taken seriously. I also appreciate that calling them “skeets” will help deter large corporations from joining for some time. (What company wants to be associated with a social media site where the posts are a tongue-in-cheek reference to ejaculate?)
It just reminds me of this… One of Killer Mike’s best, imho. Frisky Dingo died too soon.
…but for real that’s a weird thing to call it.
The shared block lists need to keep up with bad faith signups, which will stop happening once the trolls are actually trying, though. So, it’s going to be on the shoulders of the subscriber feed.
Which was something that Twitter augmented long before they were bought by Elon. And is something that will probably show up once the shareholders start pushing the company towards an IPO, which will happen eventually.
But maybe they’ll add other interesting safety features before then.
I’m wondering when the bot armies of sign-ups will come out in force to a point where blocklists can’t keep up…
Bluesky has some very powerful features here like auto updating block lists which you can subscribe to and which will automatically remove trolls for you. And they are policing hate speech and harassment.