So I finally did the thing I said I wasn't going to do this year. Sometime around 11pm on Christmas night, half a glass of bad supermarket prosecco in, I deleted the X app off my phone and set up a proper Bluesky account. Not a "just in case" account with zero posts that I'd check twice a year — an actual account, actual bio, actual profile picture that isn't the default egg-adjacent blob.
I've been watching Bluesky's numbers climb for weeks now like everyone else in my feeds. It crossed 25 million users a couple weeks back, which sounds small next to X's hundreds of millions until you remember that most of that growth happened in about six weeks, mostly after the US election in November. That's the kind of curve that usually means either a fad or a genuine platform shift, and I honestly can't tell which one this is yet. Ask me again in six months.
What actually made me switch
It wasn't any single headline. It was more that every time I opened X in December it felt like wading through a swamp to find the three accounts I actually still care about — the weird niche photography people, the one guy who posts nothing but transit infrastructure takes, a handful of old blogging friends. Everything else was noise, ads, and posts from accounts I never followed getting shoved into my timeline because the algorithm decided I needed to see them. I'm 43 years old and I do not need an algorithm deciding what I need to see.
Bluesky's custom feeds are the thing that actually sold me, not the vibes. You can build or subscribe to a feed that's just, say, "people talking about film photography" and it stays that. No mystery ranking, no "for you" nonsense bleeding in. It feels a bit like RSS again, honestly, which is a weird thing to say about a social network in 2024 but there it is. I've had this blog running since November 2011 and RSS never really died for me, it just went underground for a decade.
The stuff that's annoying about it too
I'm not going to pretend it's perfect. The "starter packs" feature is fine in theory but it's turned into this weird status game where people curate lists like they're building a fantasy football roster of who's cool enough to include. I got added to two of them by people I've never spoken to and it felt oddly flattering and oddly gross at the same time. Also the app crashed on me twice in three days trying to load images, which, fine, it's still a smaller operation, I get it, but it's the kind of thing that makes we wonder how it handles a real traffic spike.
And there's the obvious elephant sitting in the corner of this whole migration story: nobody quite knows what happens to any of these platforms once the new US administration takes office next month, especially with the TikTok situation still working its way through the Supreme Court on an expedited timeline. Oral arguments are set for the second week of January. If TikTok actually goes dark, or gets sold, or whatever ends up happening, I'd bet real money we see another wave of people scattering across Bluesky, Threads, and wherever else, all over again. Platform migrations used to feel rare. Now it's basically a seasonal event, like geese flying south.
Anyway. I'm not deleting my X account, I still need it for a couple of work things I can't move yet, but the app's off my phone and that alone has been good for my brain. I noticed I've been reading actual books again in the evenings instead of doomscrolling, which is either a coincidence or the most predictable outcome in the world.
One last thing, unrelated but it's bugging me: does anyone else's radiator make that horrible knocking sound in the first cold snap of the year? Mine's been doing it every night this week and I still haven't figured out if it's air in the pipes or something actually wrong. If you know, email me. I've googled it four times and gotten four different answers, which feels about right for how 2024 has gone in general.