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 won’t be for a few reasons:
Most of it is explicitly anti-commercial in the sense that most users want to get to know other users not just their work
Folks keep introducing it in a way that is difficult for new users to understand
Having said that federation can be difficult to understand if you aren’t seeing others and don’t get why
There are no algorithms, full text search or indexing which most users from commercial social media want, but we don’t for privacy and anti-commercial reasons.
Quite a bit of mastodon cares more about sustainability and community than upping their numbers so most of the non spammy, well moderated servers have registrations closed or reviewed (or whatever it is called) and most people might find that difficult to deal with.
Tyranica moderation, meaning onerous decision of which instance you join will restrict the range of your permitted opinions. And lastly, no real way to migrate your account without damaging your relationships and reputation. Again making the instance decision very important.
This combined with infective content discovery means mastodon will remain a niche nerdtoy clubhouse
It’ll stop being ‘tyranica’ when users stop being racist etc and harassing others, until then the good instances will keep banning and blocking those that won’t do anything about it.
Also, spam is a problem on open instances.
Edit: How do you do ‘content discovery’ without violating people’s consent or opening them up to harrasment?
Mastodon, at least from where I look is doing fine and I couldn’t be happier with the moderation or community I have found there, most of them not at all tech obsessives.
I use both and Mastodon is missing a lot of the quality of life features of Bluesky.
These things make Bluesky very easy to get started with and more powerful even than Xitter was. It’s simply a better product if you have any requirements other than federation.
I wish it were otherwise, but that’s just the way it is.
How is user verification done?
You put a snippet of code on your website.
Ah, so exactly like Mastodon.
And if you don’t have or perhaps want a website?
Does verification do anything?
Does it create haves and have nots?
It does nothing. Verification is only important in general for public individuals, anyway. Public officials, celebrities, etc. Those people have the means to do it. They also have the means to host their own instance on their own domain, or on a government domain, which is even better verification of identity.
But most of us do not need to give a damn.
It just gives you a checkmark, nothing else AFAIK.