BlueSky hits #1 in the App Store, is it worth switching from Twitter?

Every time Elon Musk has done something people hate with Twitter (now X), other newly emerged rival sites like BlueSky and Threads surge in downloads. Then people usually just come back or don’t really leave until the cycle starts again. However, things may be different this time.

Now, in the wake of Trump’s election and Elon’s literal appointment to a role in his administration, Twitter has seen a huge exodus of users, and BlueSky has seen a record increase of over a million new signups, in addition to users previously accounting for to come back. As a result, BlueSky is currently the #1 app in Apple’s App Storewith the other biggest Twitter rival, Threads, at #2.

Is it time for you to switch from Twitter to BlueSky? Well, it depends on what you’re looking for, and I can mainly only speak for my own experience.

Commitment: One of my biggest concerns is trying to rebuild an audience on BlueSky, as it took me almost 15 years to amass 180,000 followers on Twitter. But now with only 11,000 on BlueSky, I get almost the same engagement on the platform, if not more, at times. Part of this is users who really enjoy BlueSky and stick around, part of this is that huge chunks of a large following based like mine on Twitter at this point are bots or defunct accounts. Also, there’s no algorithm cracking you down for whatever you might post (links to external sites, for example). So this has become less of a concern for me than before.

Actual, logical properties: While Twitter has removed almost all safeguards from its platforms like a melting down nuclear power plant, BlueSky has a robust set of security and content moderation tools, including a block functionality that still actually works and ways to customize your feed so you’re not being fed a lot of things you hate.

More people are there now: This is pretty simple, but more and more people are moving over to BlueSky so it feels less like a ghost town than when it launched. This includes e.g. longtime mutuals, but also the kind of public figures you want to follow over there. Not everyone is, but with these recent increases, more and more people are going over and posting more and more often as a result.

An “echo chamber”?: One of the biggest complaints about BlueSky is that it feels too much like a predominantly liberal echo chamber. Yes, in some ways that’s true, and yet as someone who’s gotten really tired of the discourse on Twitter, it’s nice to post things, even unpopular opinions, without getting yelled at by dozens of people you don’t even know. I did a test post about how I liked The Acolyte, a controversial Star Wars show, and my mentions were full of people who either liked it or didn’t, but essentially said “you do.” On Twitter, I’d have thirty people call me a joke and bemoan the state of woke entertainment journalism. A right-wing poster would quote tweet me, and five rage-farming YouTubers would make videos about me (“Forbes Journalist Shills for Disney Star Wars!”). In short, I see BlueSky as less of an echo chamber and more of a “people don’t scream anymore” me all the time”, which is nice.

BlueSky may still only have a fraction of Twitter’s user base, but we now have to start factoring in the sheer volume of bots and abandoned accounts out there, so the gap may be closer than we think. Is it time to switch? For me, I still have to straddle both for my job, but I think it’s time a lot of people seriously considered doing that, given the state of things over there.

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Get my sci-fi novels Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.