So this week my mentions are full of people I haven't heard from in years all announcing, with the exact same slightly embarrassed energy, that they've made a Bluesky account. You know the post. "ok fine, I'm here now too" with a link to a blue butterfly logo. I made fun of this exodus back in 2022 when it happened with Mastodon and nothing really stuck. This one feels different, and I want to write down why before I forget what it felt like, because I think in six months everyone will pretend this was obvious.
The proximate cause isn't a mystery. Last week's election result, and Elon's very public, very well-compensated role in getting Trump elected, pushed a lot of people who'd been holding onto X out of sheer inertia to finally just leave. Bluesky's own numbers people have been posting screenshots of put new signups somewhere around half a million to 700,000 in just the past several days, and the app jumped to the top of the free apps chart on the App Store, which if you'd told me that in 2023 when it was invite-only and felt like a private beta for tech journalists, I wouldn't have believed you.
I signed up for Bluesky back when you needed a code, sat on it for about four months doing basically nothing, and only opened it again this week because three different podcasts I listen to mentioned it in the same 48 hours. Here's my actual honest take on going back in: it's rough in the specific way early Twitter was rough, and I mean that as a compliment. The timeline is chronological by default. There's no algorithm shoving promoted garbage or rage-bait quote tweets at you every third post. It genuinely feels like 2011-2012 Twitter, back when I started this blog, before the platform figured out that outrage keeps people scrolling longer than jokes do.
The "starter packs" feature is doing a lot of the onboarding work here and it's smarter than it sounds. Instead of the cold-start problem of following zero people and seeing an empty timeline, you can grab a themed list somebody made, tech journalists, local news, whatever, and follow the whole bundle in one tap. I grabbed a "tech blogs and independent writers" pack somebody had put together and immediately had a readable feed. Small thing, but it solves the actual reason most people bounce off a new social network in the first ten minutes.
Complaints, because I'm not going to pretend this is a clean win: the search is still bad, quote posts work weird compared to what you're used to, and half the accounts I followed are clearly dormant test accounts from the invite-only era, so my follower graph is a mess of ghosts. Also, and this is a small personal gripe, I hate that every single client and every single article covering this has to explain what a "PDS" and the AT Protocol are before getting to the point. I get that the decentralization angle is the actual interesting engineering story here, Bluesky isn't just "Twitter but nicer," it's built so that in theory anyone can run their own server and the identity layer isn't locked to one company. But most people migrating this week don't care about that, they care that their favorite film critic and two of their old coworkers are posting there now instead of on X.
I don't think X collapses overnight because of this. Habits are sticky and the network effects on the incumbent are still enormous, way bigger than what MySpace had left when Facebook ate it. But I do think this is the first week since Bluesky launched that it's stopped being a curiosity for online-too-much people like me and started being somewhere normal, semi-famous people actually post first. A few journalists I follow put their Bluesky handle in their bio above their X one for the first time this week. That's the tell to watch, not the raw signup numbers.
I'm keeping both accounts open for now. Cross-posting is annoying and I'm too lazy to set up a bot to mirror one to the other, so for a while this blog's links are probably going to show up in two places with slightly different typos in each caption. Not exactly a crisis. Just the kind of low-stakes platform churn I've apparently been writing about, in one form or another, since this blog started.