tropic slots The Fragility of Bluesky’s Difference
Liberals moving away from X are giving up on the 20th-century ideal of a public sphere, best described by Hannah Arendt as a place that “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.”
Bluesky, the destination of the moment, is experiencing a post-election surge of new users as millions of mostly liberal users of X (nee Twitter) have moved over to the Twitter-like platform, which opened to the public last year. The platform had 13 million users by early November; 10 million more joined over the next month.
Now that social media is ubiquitous, growth in one platform often means lost users for another. The Bluesky migration suggests that the broader the “us” gathered together, the harder it is to prevent our falling on another. (Owners of giant social media platforms often imagine they can get good moderation for many users with little effort, when that is a distinctly “pick two” choice.)
On social media, the political is personal; migrating Bluesky users are signaling political separation from an increasingly conservative X and giving up on the idea of a town square that holds all voices simultaneously.
It’s obvious why liberal users might want to leave X. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 (and renamed it in 2023), he has reshaped the platform to be more welcoming to racism, misogyny and anti-immigrant and antitrans sentiment than even the old freewheeling Twitter. Abandoning early promises to not reinstate barred users without the judgment of a review board, Mr. Musk reversed previous suspensions and bans for Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler; James Lindsay, an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. activist; and, of course, Donald Trump, who was barred after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Mr. Musk hasn’t just made X more conservative; he has also made it harder for users to ignore far-right and MAGA content, dismantling tools they had relied on to filter out those voices. X was originally a rebranding of Twitter, but over time, the service has become, in internet parlance, a Nazi bar.
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