Hey there Mr Blue (sky)

We’re so please to be with you (sky)

Blue Sky. Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-skies-53594/

I’ve had that Electric Light Orchestra song stuck in my head for a few days now. Unsurprisingly my earworm has been triggered by the X-odus of twitter users, following the outcome of the US election, to one of the fastest growing microblogging platforms, Bluesky.

If you’ve not heard of it yet, you soon will. For a few days at the end of last week Bluesky added a million new users every day (although this has slowed somewhat over the weekend) and over 18 million people have signed up for accounts so far (although Adam Mosseri, the boss of Meta’s Threads, is keen to tell everyone that they have done those sorts of numbers in the month of November alone).

One of the lyrics in the ELO song goes “Mr. Blue Sky, please tell us why. You had to hide away for so long (so long)”. I have to say this lyric encapsulated many of my earlier frustrations with the Bluesky platform. I joined back in May 2023 when sign-ups were by invitation only. If I’m honest I was not very impressed. You couldn’t post pictures or videos, you couldn’t post threads and engagement (due to limited ser numbers) felt very limited. I doled out invite codes where I could, but even the six codes a day I was able to share was not going to allow me to build a network very quickly. Bluesky did not feel like a viable alternative to twitter, for the simple fact that so few people were allowed in.

It turns out, as you might expect, that sign-ups were limited to allow the development team to fix some of the bugs in the background without also having to contend with being overwhelmed by new users. Bluesky now, for example, gives users the ability to post pictures and even videos. Even this well-thought out strategy hasn’t stopped Bluesky having it’s wobbles over the last week as it contends with huge numbers of new sign-ups.

This last week has felt like a sea change, as disaffected X users have flocked to Bluesky. Bluesky already hosts those with big twitter followings; comedians like Dara Ó Briain and MPs like Layla Moran and Jess Philips have added credibility to the platform. The Guardian’s high profile X-it and subsequent establishment of a Bluesky account have also made many social media punters believe that Bluesky could be a viable rival for other social media platforms.

To tweet or not to tweet

Despite the opportunity that Bluesky presents, many of us will find it difficult to give up the hard fought communities we have established on X over a number of years. Friends and fellow science communicators that I have spoken to are split on the question of whether to abandon X completely, to dally with both or simply to stick with X. Some have argued that we, as scientists, need to stay on twitter to balance out the anti-science, conspiracy laden voices that are increasingly given prominence by Musk’s algorithmic tweaks. They suggest that it is our duty to combat the misinformation that is being spread on X, that we must fight for truth and speak to people where they are.

As far as communicating science goes I would not disagree with the idea that we have to speak to diverse audiences and to make the effort to meet people where they are and not just where we would like them to be. The problem with this line of reasoning is that, on X, we are being asked to fight with one hand tied behind our backs. Our posts are given less and less prominence – throttled in favour of post from users more sympathetic to Elon Musk’s world-view. It is impossible to fight disinformation on a platform in which disinformation is not just tolerated, but prized and promoted.

Of course, the problem with the fragmentation of the social-media landscape is that it risks us becoming siloed. If we no-longer interact with those whom we disagree, we will end up talking past each other, with no hope of winning each other over or at least putting the other side of the argument.

I have heard other, more politically motivated, X-users argue that leaving X is a futile gesture since the damage Musk wanted to inflict has already been done. There is no doubt that Musk’s use of X helped influence the outcome of the US election, but having had such success, why would he stop there? Who knows for which causes X will be put into service over the next four years. And we must not forget there will be future elections in the US the UK and of course in other countries. Diminishing the stranglehold over the microblogging landscape of a significant source of disinformation can be no bad thing when it comes to holding free and fair elections. Quite apart from anything else, I feel I could do without creating content and driving engagement (which underpins the fabric of any social networking site) for Musk’s X.

Not that the current fall in user numbers means it is on the horizon in the near future, but there’s no doubt that there would also be a degree of schadenfreude if X were to fail. It would be a nice lesson for Musk to learn that your users are important - that if you make changes that are unpopular with the majority of your user-base then you can expect them to leave and your business to struggle. Although what the failure of X would look like to Musk remains unclear. There is no doubt he can afford to run X at a loss given the huge financial gains he has made as a result of Trump’s re-election. In 2023 twitter had roughly 250 million daily users while Musk claimed it would grow to a billion in 2024. In reality even on election day two weeks ago X had only 162 million daily users. By his own previous expectations X is already failing, but he probably doesn’t care. No doubt he blames X’s poor performance on the fact that he inherited a struggling business, although that perhaps doesn’t explain why he thought it was worth 44 billion dollars when he bought it.

Where do I go from here

At the time of writing my Bluesky follower numbers sit at around a quarter of those of my X account. But as user numbers on Bluesky continue to grow, and those on X continue to fall, this may even up further. At the point at which my Bluesky audience matches my X audience the choice of where to engage will already have become a no-brainer. Why engage in the cess-pit of misinformation that X has become and suffer the concomitant daily abuse when I could speak to the same number of people on Bluesky without the bile, the hate and the outright lies I’ve encountered on X?

I’ve lost almost 2000 X followers in the last 30 days (especially since the results of the US election) in a trend which looks set to continue.

To give you a feel for the sort of things I encounter over there, here’s a direct message I was sent last week (see image below). And this is relatively mild compared to some of the abuse I have received in the past. My female colleagues and colleagues of colour have received much, much worse. So far, I haven’t had a single piece of personal abuse on Bluesky, although I appreciate my sampling window has been relatively short!

I’m excited about what the future of Bluesky holds, not least perhaps because, without the extreme suppression introduced by X, I hope that more people will get the chance to read these long-form pieces here on substack. Let’s hope for better from Bluesky over the next few years than we have received from X over the past few. As ELO put it “And don't you know, it's a beautiful new day?”