Why I’m tired of Elon Musk’s X — and optimistic about Bluesky

Journalists are migrating there in droves. Celebrity actors and musicians pour in. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has joined the party, and the New York mayor’s office is ordering agencies to camp out. They call it #Xodus and it happens fast.

Millions of social media junkies and power users are pivoting from using X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, to creating accounts on Bluesky, a busy platform that resembles Twitter’s earlier days, before Musk turned it into a far-right hotbed and a technically useless mess.

Bluesky was developed in recent years by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, as a kind of open and decentralized alternative to Twitter. (Dorsey has since left the board of Bluesky.) In terms of the basic user experience and design of the site, it looks a lot like Twitter used to be before the Musk era. Bluesky had an invitational beta launch in 2023, and in February it became available to the general public. While it has grown over the year, it has seen a meteoric rise explosion in registrations after the election. And with media organizations and politicians now setting up accounts on the site, Bluesky seems to be giving off “official new alternative to Twitter” vibes.

There are many reasons why people flee X, and I don’t agree with all of them. But I can say that my personal experience on the site since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 (after which he renamed it X) has been deeply disheartening and at times infuriating.

Changes in the algorithms and default user feed means that I am constantly wading through a sickening stream of misinformation, rage baitdemagogic pundits, product placement for Musk’s other companies, and idiotic short videos that skew violent and snarky. The default feed is labeled “for you,” but compared to most social media I’ve used, the algorithm has no understanding of my interests. Instead, it’s just the most vulgar bid for generic user attention imaginable.

In addition to the disastrous “for you” feed, X has become unbearable to read. The company’s decision to push as many ads as possible into the interface often makes it impossible to tell if I’m reading a post or an ad. (There is no evidence that the visual onslaught of ads has helped Musk reclaim the giant share of ad revenue he has lost since he has destroyed the platform.) Despite the fact that one of Musk’s premises for buying Twitter was to improve the platform’s bot problem, bots now dominate the user experience at a level I have never experienced before on the Site – or anywhere else I visit the Internet. And Musk’s decision to remove Twitter’s verified badge policy has made it far more difficult for me to use the site to track reliable real-time reporting and separate rumor from fact. Musk has also said he downgrading visibility of posts with links – because he doesn’t want people to leave the site – so posts linking to legitimate news articles get buried under clickbait posts. Meanwhile, Musk has tweaked site’s algorithm to prioritize his own posts, reinforcing his power as a colossal supplier of misinformation and far-right propaganda.

Lately it feels like writing is pointless. Despite having thousands of followers, engagement on my posts has dipped and my average post seems to disappear into the ether unnoticed. When I do get engagement, a good portion of the time it’s a bot.

That is, if it’s not a bigoted, derogatory remark. Due to a combination of Musk reinstatement of verified pro-Nazi accountsthe growing popularity of X as a platform for extremist and anti-social right-wingers, and his cutting back of features and resources designed to reduce abuseX has become a miserable place filled with with toxic racists, misogynists, transphobes and trolls of all kinds. While receiving profane insults and racism is something I’ve always experienced as a journalist, I’ve noticed a huge increase in it in my daily experience at X. This isn’t political dialogue, it’s just being on the receiving end of misanthropy and hate.

This is not simply the cost of “free speech”. X have anti-harassment policies and suspends accounts for rule violations, it’s just that those rules are poorly and unpredictably enforced and limited in their ability to mitigate a platform-wide trolling culture. Furthermore, Musk’s free speech narrative is a facade. Musk has shown a pattern of suspension accounts in a way that appears to align with a right-wing political agenda. He too selectively upholds the principles of freedom of expression in various countries in a manner that reflects what might be his perceived political and business interests. And Musk’s decision to become a full-on Trump activist and to work with the Trump administration underscores his compromise as an independent speaker.

As X has slipped into dysfunctionality and extreme unpleasantness, Bluesky has emerged as an attractive alternative. It represents a return to basic, common principles of text-based social media. It’s easy to use and navigate, it’s got that good tools to reduce harassment, the default feed is a simple chronological set of posts. Posts aren’t flooded with porn bots, bigoted trolls and weird native ads. Even if I have a fraction of my old following on my new account with Blueskymy commitment is already much higher.

Some people have tried to criticize the exodus from X as a desire for people on the left to retreat into “safe spaces” and ideological echo chambers. (Not everyone heading to Bluesky is left-leaning, but it’s a left-leaning crowd in general.) I can unequivocally say that’s not the case for me. I enjoy reading and talking to people across the political spectrum, and I would prefer to spend most of my time on a platform with maximum ideological diversity. I’m not tired of X because it has people I disagree with. I’m tired of X because it stinks. A reactionary billionaire with no commitment to free speech or user experience has taken a wrecking ball to a once flawed but priceless digital commons.

I haven’t completely sworn off using X, but it won’t be a place I’ll invest as much time as I once did. I also don’t assume that Bluesky will be a perfect retreat – it is run by a company after all. But for now, I’ll mostly read people across the political spectrum outside of X and lean into having conversations online in a place that functions closer to the way a public square should.