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When it comes to social media, I’ve never been an early adopter. I joined MSN Messenger in or around 2008, and got onto Facebook a little bit later. (Looking back at my early activity on that platform recently, I found that I’d added “To err is human; to really fuck things up requires a computer” to the “favorite quotes” portion of my profile. I was sixteen years old at the time.) I owned—and actually used—a brick phone as recently as 2014.
So, when conversation swelled last year around a clutch of budding competitors to Twitter (joined: May 2011), which was in the process of rebranding as X and, as many users saw it, going to hell in a handcart under the ownership of Elon Musk, I didn’t sign up to any of them right away. Shortly after Threads—a new platform from Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram—launched (and saw explosive early growth), I explained my hesitancy in a Q&A with my then CJR colleague Mathew Ingram, a tech expert and early Threads adopter. Despite its visible degradation under Musk, X was still doing what I needed it to do for my job writing about the media: providing a hub to learn about the news and what other journalists were saying about it. Also, I was skeptical that any of its mooted competitors—Threads, but also Bluesky and Mastodon—had emerged as the alternative destination. Collectively, they seemed to represent the fragmentation of a conversation that I wanted to see in one place.
I didn’t set down any benchmark for what might finally prompt me to abandon X and head elsewhere; I guess I was applying the Potter Stewart test of knowing the benchmark only when I saw it. (Stewart, a former Supreme Court justice, famously applied that maxim to pornography; he would likely have had a field day with Musk’s X.) Fast-forward a year and a half to the election, which Donald Trump won with Musk’s enthusiastic support. For many journalists—and a few whole news organizations—the benchmark for quitting X had finally been hit: some slammed the door behind them (The Guardian, for instance, said that it would stop posting on the platform because it had become “toxic” and a tool of Muskian influence), whereas others ghosted quietly off into the ether. Some journalists had quit already, but the election seemed to mark a turning point in scale, as my colleague Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen wrote recently in this newsletter. The toxicity was finally wearing on me, too, even if I wasn’t personally seeing the parade of neo-Nazi filth apparently visible to some. Musk’s personal tweets were certainly all too visible on my timeline. (Also, content related to a soccer club that I don’t support, but did search for content about six months ago in the name of laughing at its misfortune.) Using X increasingly felt akin to being at a party and suddenly realizing that half the people who were there have left, while being cornered by a man yelling about government waste and telling me You are the media now. (I know I am!)
In the meantime, the question of where I might go to get a similar but better experience had become clearer: as Gotfredsen noted, many journalists seemed to be headed over from X to Bluesky. That platform is aesthetically very similar to X—indeed, it grew out of an idea hatched by Jack Dorsey, who was then the CEO of Twitter, in 2019—but it has a different philosophy: whereas X is centralized and walled off from the rest of the internet, Bluesky is designed to be open, collaborative, and democratic—encouraging developers to build on top of its architecture and users to tailor their algorithms so that they might see only the sort of content they want to see. Bluesky finally launched last year, but in invite-only mode. Early reviews were mixed: The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang likened it to “a Portland coffee shop: there are dogs, beards, earnest self-expression about the finely curated superiority of it all, and a whole lot of white people”; Kevin Roose, a tech writer at the New York Times, found early Bluesky hard to use and its users annoying. But Roose is now a convert: Bluesky, he wrote recently, is much better these days. It’s certainly much bigger these days, adding millions of users around the election alone. The liberal stereotype has persisted: after Trump won, Wired suggested that moving to Bluesky is the new moving to Canada.
And so I decided to give it a try—not for this reason, exactly, but because the sort of journalistic conversation that I like to follow seemed finally to be migrating there in a concentrated enough way. Crucially, Bluesky has encouraged this, listing journalists among the core groups that it seeks to serve and promising that (unlike on X these days) it won’t punish users for linking to news articles by downranking such posts. (Rose Wang, a Bluesky executive, has called the app “a lobby to the open web.”) Threads, by contrast, has expressed little interest in becoming a hub for talking about political news. (Also, as I told Ingram after it launched, I’ve never understood why X users concerned about Musk’s power would run right into the arms of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO.) As for Mastodon: it sounds great from everything I’ve read about it, but also too techy for this Luddite.
After creating a Bluesky account (easy), I stepped into the promised land. The first things I saw on my “Discover” feed—the most similar part of the app to X, in the sense of being a collection of algorithmically thrown-up content—included posts about wolves, for some reason. I also quickly saw a news article informing me of another departure from X: that of the European Federation of Journalists, which said it could “no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner has transformed into a machine of disinformation.” This would not be the last time that I would see content criticizing X in my early adventures on Bluesky. Bluesky itself also appeared to be a popular topic of conversation; at least some of this was tongue in cheek (I think), but much of it was gratingly self-congratulatory. At one point, a post in my Discover feed showed me a sober-sounding interview with Bluesky’s CEO about the platform’s “responsibility” in this moment; the next post informed me that “they’re gatekeeping crack groups on X” above a photo of a bag of ketamine. As word spread about the declaration of martial law in South Korea, I saw serious journalists suggest that Bluesky had been the place to follow it, and thus, perhaps, finally come into its own as the beating heart of the global news cycle. (It was, at least, the place to follow the excellent coverage of Sarah Jeong, a journalist at The Verge who happened to be in Seoul, and was drunk—that is, unless you saw the screenshots of her posts on X or read her account in The Verge.)
A tab at the top of the Discover feed—headed “GETTING STARTED”—encouraged me to “like” ten posts in order to teach the algorithm what sort of content I, well, like. A little wheel illustrated my progress toward that milestone. For some reason, the visualization made this very basic task (in essence, all such algorithms determine what you like based on your behavior) feel like an awesome responsibility: How to distill myself in ten clicks of approval? It took me an eternity to hit five, with a frivolous like of a funny post about Spotify Wrapped; instantly, a pop-up congratulated me on getting halfway to my goal. In the end, I ripped the Band-Aid off, dutifully liking a mix of posts about press freedom and journalism that struck a balance between earnestness and fun. Soon after making the wheel go away, Discover served me a post by the billionaire Mark Cuban: “If we all find 100 posts to like every day, engagement and good will on [Bluesky] grows exponentially,” he wrote. “Is it worth a few minutes to make the platform stronger?” I went to like Cuban’s post, then thought better of it.
Reader, I did follow him, though. Like training the algorithm, the responsibility of building up a network on Bluesky by following other users’ accounts initially felt crushing: over my years on X, I have compiled a list of around 3,600 accounts that, perhaps by luck more than judgment, has helped populate my feed with enough of the stuff that I want to see; on Bluesky, I’d have to start from zero. I began to simply replicate my X following list, but gave up after deciding that approach was futile. After a few days, I learned about “starter packs,” or lists of accounts that generally post on a given topic or area, curated by another user; I found a reliable-sounding “journalists” one (via Roose, in the Times) and followed the accounts therein with one easy click, bringing my total accounts followed to… 211. Then there were the accounts that followed me: mostly people I had followed, but also the politician and Bluesky power user Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (okay fine, someone pretending to be her) and, erm, some accounts that Potter Stewart might know if he saw them.
Throughout this period, I kept using X, too. (I created a folder for the two apps on my iPhone, labeled “X and things,” so that when I went instinctively to open X, I’d be confronted with the choice of Bluesky, too.) At first, I found flicking back and forth between the two apps to be migraine-inducing, the one an uncanny imitation of the other, though at one point as I scrolled, I managed to forget which I was on (at least until a post from Musk screamed across my line of sight). At times, the news-following journey felt very different on either app—the arrest of the alleged assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, for example, was a much more anarchic, meme-drenched experience on X—but often, I saw similar posts on both. (For example, snark about a glossy old Vogue profile of Bashar al-Assad’s wife.)
I can’t see myself leaving X altogether: amid all the Musk and legacy-schadenfreude soccer content, it continues to throw up surprising or otherwise edifying content about the media beat that I might not otherwise have seen, which is what I always liked about it (for all the concern that, even in its pomp, it was an echo chamber). And it remains at least a somewhat useful place for me to promote my work. (In recent months, a random tweet that was bumped into my timeline unlocked an interesting story that I subsequently reported in depth; on a different occasion, throwing out some ranty tweets of my own got me a magazine commission.) I haven’t posted much on Bluesky yet, but for now, it feels like shouting into a void. Of course, this is because I haven’t yet built a community there—but for now, the prospect of doing that feels tenuous and, frankly, exhausting. (Over the years, I’ve accumulated more than six thousand users who follow me on X—not a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but one that feels big to me.) Don’t get me wrong: there is much to like about Bluesky. Its emphasis on user choice is laudable, as is its flexibility in how you can organize the information you see. (In addition to the X-style Discover feed, for example, there’s a feed that simply shows posts from users you follow in chronological order; you can also add different, themed feeds and flick between them all.) But with choice comes work.
Maybe I’m just being lazy; maybe it’s December and I’ll start climbing the mountain in January. But maybe I will never want to do the work when I get the same sort of insight from the news sources that I already consume—including, just about, the husk of X. And, if that app increasingly resembles an emptying party, Bluesky can, at times, feel like a rival party where people are trying too hard to have fun, while shouting about WHAT A SUPERIOR PARTY THIS IS over the slightly too loud music. Maybe I just want the old party back, before half the people left and the government-waste guy showed up. But that party is over.
All to say, you can follow me on Bluesky: I’m at @jonallsop.bsky.social. Or don’t. Up to you.
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