By Shelly Brisbin
May 12, 2023 2:42 PM PT
Tracking the many social-media migrations
Last week, I joined Bluesky, the new hotness in social platforms. It’s the latest refuge for those who have beef with the way Elon Musk runs Twitter. Last November, I queued up to rejoin Mastodon, the existing-but-revitalized platform that was the first beneficiary of agita over Musk’s Twitter takeover.
Despite boarding the outbound train relatively early, I still maintain Twitter accounts for myself and the things I make. All that is to say, I’m experiencing these three platforms all at once and finding them very different from one another in more than the obvious ways.
Being on Mastodon feels different than being on Bluesky, which is not like today’s Twitter. This despite the fact that a lot of people besides me appear to maintain accounts and even continue posting on all three. In my feed, the multiplatformers tend to be journalists of the tech and general-interest varieties, along with an array of other content creators. Some folks copy-paste their stuff everywhere, but many seem to understand how easily that behavior rankles. Like me, they’re hesitant to make a commitment to a single platform. And, like me, they’re probably thinking a lot about the kind of voice they want to project on each.
The people I follow because I like them personally are a little more likely to have chosen one place to be active, even if they have accounts spread around. That’s also true of interest-based communities who have collectively decided where they want to pitch their online camps. If I want to talk with fellow classic movie geeks, that’s Twitter. Lots of software developers and accessibility-focused peeps have migrated to Mastodon. The scarcity of Bluesky invites means it’s hard to judge who will make it home. But so far, the place feels like one where people crave seeing and being seen. Somewhere you might go to get followed by a famous person.
These are all logical ways of understanding your place online. Who do you want to reach, and who do you want to hear from? But it’s also true that each of these places has its own personality – a vibe that’s created by users who feel at home enough to contribute their words and pictures and maybe push the envelope in a way that advances their version of a desirable online world. And for my money, some vibes are better than others.
The Blue Bird of Complacency
Twitter rarely did me dirty in my own feed. After more than 15 years there, it was just the place that everyone was; the place where I bantered with other podcasters back in the day, got plugged into accessibility communities for the first time, promoted my books, and figured out how to follow Texas news obsessively on Election night or during the six months every two years the Legislature is in session. Musk’s takeover created a bright line – the beginning of more promoted content, the unwelcome For You tab, making my feed even more algorithmic than it was. In other ways, nothing much changed. Almost every reporter I know still tweets. The classic film bloggers and fans who keep up a running commentary on the movies we love still gather to watch TCM together. And my friends who are both Twitter users and non-tech people keep commenting on traffic or their favorite TV shows. Up until earlier this year, when Musk signaled a lax attitude toward hate speech on the platform, even the few famous-people-accounts I followed were still out there plugging projects or posting pictures of adorable things. It was possible to ignore a lot of how Musk has remade the platform.
You can still ignore it if your feed is well-groomed and you don’t care about legacy blue checkmarks or the API’s destruction of benevolent bot accounts. But it feels fragile, as if one troll or a neglected security feature could break up your happy reality, just as the disappearance of all those cool accounts did for those who’ve already left.
Utopia Has Rules
On Mastodon, the noncorporate, tech-forward dream is still alive. The folks who abandoned Twitter the earliest have plowed enormous energy into their homesteads on the federated plain. They write up intro guides for newbies, consider carefully which server feels like home to them, and wax on and on about the quality of specific third-party Mastodon apps. They boost strangers’ posts and follow liberally. They are earnest and sometimes starry-eyed about the promise of a social network not controlled by one company’s algorithms. Spend a lot of time there, and you’ll start believing everyone has migrated over from Twitter. Or everyone you would actually want to talk to, anyway.
I feel comfortable on Mastodon because I want to live in a world where my data is not currency. But I have seen people correct those who are not embodying the upright Mastodon dream. I had to switch servers when a dispute between major servers and those who ran my old one led to mine being defederated in a few places. I wasn’t asked my opinion or told it was happening. The defederation caused me to lose contact with lots of people I followed. Defederation is a core remedy for conflict over how Mastodon servers are run, but it’s not a very utopian process when it happens with no warning to the community.
School’s Out
If Mastodon is like a Habitat for Humanity build – all goodwill and productive earnestness – Bluesky is like Lollapalooza. It’s loud. It’s irreverent. It’s mischievous. And it’s crawling with people who want to be noticed. You’ll find celebrity journalists, politicians, and entertainment types with adorably low follower counts – because it’s invite-only so far, and those coveted codes are hard to come by. You’ll also find nudity, AI-based thread hijacking, and harassment. Everyone seems to be flirting with everyone and using their outside voices. And it feels like the people who are happiest there are those who bucked up the hardest against Musk’s Twitter regime. Whether you lost your legacy blue checkmark or had your posting bot murdered by the API lockdown, Bluesky feels like freedom, and a lot of its early fans, and the people they’ve invited, are acting like they’re on social media spring break. That’s totally a choice, and one that some folks a bit younger than I am will embrace wholeheartedly.
These opinions are mine, of course, and subjective based on my own feeds. And they’re a snapshot in time. Users come and go from social platforms all the time, and communities can evolve into hellscapes or into vibrant stews of news and information with room for diverse voices. Hopefully, the tools we use to connect can evolve, too, along with community standards. Bluesky doesn’t really have those yet, and users should ask hard questions about their security, their ability to address misinformation and harassment, and the ultimate business model of the place.
Mastodon fans will have to decide if they’ve got access to as many people and as much information as they once did on Twitter, and whether that affects the way they want to use the platform.
Twitter users should probably continue to expect the unexpected.
[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]