Is Bluesky the social media saviour we’ve been waiting for?
And is it a good enough reason to leave Twitter (whoops, X)?
Although I signed up to Bluesky months ago it’s been Elon Musk’s very public (and expensive) intervention in the American election that has made many of us want to jump ship including, notably, The Guardian and its stable of writers.
About a million users a day according to this report from the BBC.
Is it just because of Musk? Well partly - he’s a deeply unappealing character but frankly Mark Zuckerberg of Meta which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatApp, which I suspect we all use regularly, doesn’t seem particularly loveable either.
TikTok - on which I’m not active - was founded by two Chinese entrepreneurs Zhang Yiming and Liango Ruboand according to USA Today and is now owned by ByteDance. How much do we all know about them?
More to the point, X is very much not Twitter, or at least not Twitter in the halcyon early days. It’s stuffed with ads for products and services you don’t want to buy (“AI 'hallucinations' are a problem investors can't afford” WTF), rarely lets you see the accounts you’re interested in or show the people who follow you, yours. Even the name and logo is grim.
Remember how much fun it used to be, exchanging banter with people who went on to become friends. I met half the people I know in Bristol through Twitter. It used to be a happy place, now it’s a dreary, snippy one.
I was on Twitter for three reasons - to find out what was going on in the world, to have direct access to people I followed (it was amazing what you could achieve through a DM) and to talk about what I was up to myself. That’s become harder - not least because X won’t show posts that mention Substack. (Instagram is reluctant to too.)
The big question is do I come off X? I certainly want to but it’s a big step. Although there is obviously some duplication I have just under 88k followers across my two accounts (one for food, one for drink, don’t ask!) so I’d like to take some of my followers with me but it would be hard to replicate those numbers in the short or even medium term.
Certainly people more high profile than me are hedging their bets - Nigella, i noticed, for one. We don’t know much about Bluesky or how viable it is either. The founder, the former head of Twitter Jack Dorsey, is no longer involved according to the Beeb.
What other options are there? I’ve never been able to get my head round Mastadon and Discord. I don’t post much on Facebook except for my Matching Food & Wine page. I show my face occasionally on Linkedin but it’s a bit dull. Which leaves instagram as the only platform on which I’m reasonably active. (As food_writer if you want to follow me.)
So personally I think Bluesky is worth a punt. You can find me there at fibeckett.bsky.social. And if you’re tempted here’s a post on how to get the best out of it.
What about you? What do you think of Bluesky, on what other platforms, if any, are you active or do you try and stay clear of social media these days?
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Love the idea of reconnecting with those I used to chew the fat with on Twitter, and a space where that conversation might be engaging and informative. But finishing on X was the best thing I did for my health at the time I quit (about 16 months ago). I don't think I have it in me to go back to something that could turn that way again. I tried Threads for a while, but I think leaving X was really about getting some time back for myself away from screens and all of the vitriol as much as anything else.
I've found so few followers migrate with you to threads 1,500 as against circa 10,000 0n X, and frankly threads is full of tedious stories about flights, grandchildren and health hacks that go on and on.
Bluesky okay so far but there I have circa 200 followers against 6,000 on Insta.
I use Insta most now but as we will all have noticed that too has changed.....