#WTH X vs Bluesky

Competition is good. Echo chambers are not.

I’m not a huge X (Twitter) user, but here’s why I like it: I can pop off when watching debates or during big news events, and like substack, it’s P2P (did I just make that up?) — person to person, no middle man. I also really appreciate being able to hear directly from Ayatollah Khamenei, Xi Jinping, opposition players around the Middle East, Ukraine watchers, and lots and lots of people like that. But I noticed after Election Day that I lost about 350 followers or so. I don’t pay close attention to the numbers — it took me two weeks to see it — but that’s a pretty big chunk of my modest 15k. I’m not too troubled about the why; it’s probably because I have a gig with NBC News, and their watchers skew left. But where did they go? Aaaah, Bluesky.

I don’t like living in an echo chamber, so off I went to create my Bluesky account and see what it was all about. For those who don’t pay attention to this social media stuff, Bluesky is the X rival started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. In short, it’s an attempt to provide a non-Musk alternative to people who want to tweet, but don’t want to associate with anything Musk-owned or Musk-adjacent. (Note the rank hypocrisy of these types, so many of whom own Teslas.) Now, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with competition, even when it’s ideologically motivated, so good for X, Bluesky, and everyone else except Threads, which seems to exist solely in order for its users to whine incessantly about everything.

Back to X. The site has about 611 million users (these are estimates because X doesn’t share user stats). Bluesky has about 22 million, up manyfold since the election. Gleeful reports around the media-sphere trumpeted an exodus of users from X since the election, but more recent stories make clear that that exodus has been reversed by new users and new downloads. And in the head-to-head comparison of users in the United States, “X had 25 million daily active users in the States […] according to Sensor Tower’s research, which is the same amount it had a week after the election.” Per The Wrap, “Threads, according to Sensor Tower’s data, had 11 million American DAUs on Tuesday, and Bluesky had 622,000” as of November 19.

In short, X still dominates the market. And not only that, research shows that X is almost perfectly ideologically balanced, with users leaning half left/half right. What should that lead us to infer about the post-election exodus of far Left celebs, media influencers, “journalists,” and their fellow travelers? Obviously, the platform was skewed heavily to the Left, and now that it is balanced, progressives don’t like it anymore.

For those of us who lived through Covid watching Twitter suppress microdeviationists, doubters, conservatives, and anyone else the glitterati deemed unkosher, there is a good-riddance feeling about losing those who are so biased they cannot tolerate even the notion of being part of something owned by Musk (except Tesla!). But if that exodus succeeds or gathers real steam, X actually will risk becoming exactly what its accusers now allege — a right-wing echo chamber. This would be a shame, as it’s the back and forth, the easy access to a variety of views, and the overall well-roundedness of the site that’s a good thing.

Let’s also look at the claim that X is now a cesspool of white supremacy, Neo-Nazis, MAGA creeps, and fascist simps. My answer is purely personal, but I’ve been on Twitter/X since 2009: What the hell are you people talking about? The site has always been a cesspool of no-name scumbags, Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian bots, haters, racists (of all colors), antisemites, Commies, terrorists, goons, and, for the most part, normal people. I follow 1885 people. I don’t allow people whom I don’t follow to comment on my posts. Again, what the hell are you people doing on X that you see the excrement? Are you looking for it? Do you regularly read the bathroom wall? Why?

We are all being accused of curating our news to the point that we don’t see or hear views that are inconsistent with our own. But suddenly our ears are too pure for a site that’s 50/50? If only the Washington Post and the New York Times were 50/50, I’d read them cover to cover every day.

Back to Bluesky. Now, I’m a newbie, and I only follow 12 people and I have 8 followers, including someone pretending to be Alanis Morissette. (If you can pretend to be anyone, why Alanis Morrisette???) On the other hand, I made clear my interests on the setup page, and spent some time over the last two days on the “Discover” page, where, theoretically I would see all sorts of offerings in my wheelhouse. Nah. What I saw was a whole lot of Morgan Freeman (dude, shut up), and a truly embarrassing dark, echoing cave full of liberals stroking each others’ egos. Cringe does not begin to describe this.

There’s no small chance I’ve missed the best of Bluesky notwithstanding my efforts, and there’s no question that if you go looking, you will easily find vileness on X. My point was not to cherrypick… Ok, not to only cherrypick. My point is that building a counterpoint to what X is imagined to be rather than what it is, is an exercise in partisanship above good sense.

Most of us who pay attention to politics and culture know all too well that Americans have segregated themselves politically in many ways, going so far as to move states in order to be with more ideologically congenial people (and pay lower taxes, ahem). This is a free country, so if you’re so inclined, knock yourselves out. But as a Washington denizen, allow me to underscore that if you are blissfully unaware of what your ideological adversaries are thinking, you are not going to do a fantastic job representing your country, your business, educating the public or your kids, or, frankly, fashioning credible arguments about your own beliefs. Living in an ideological bubble doesn’t make you smarter.

Now, you may tell me that Bluesky is full of everyone but the MAGA knuckle draggers, and that there are plenty of “good” conservatives who can share their perspectives. And I will tell you right back that 77 million people voted for the MAGA guy, and that vast mass of them are good, patriotic, and normal Americans. Shutting them out may be what the psychiatrist ordered for the mentally unstable “resist” community, but for the press, politicians, and business leaders, shutting out half the nation is nothing short of insane.