Technology

But we don’t need a government to step in and tell us to stop using X; we could do that on our own. Brazilians, Twitterless, have been migrating to Bluesky, which was set up in 2019 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Bluesky’s Wang described on Monday “a wild ride even in the last four days. As of this morning, we’ve had nearer 2 million new users.” If we all did that (I’ve done that!), would it obliterate X’s power? Or would there just be a bifurcation, a Good Place and a Bad Place?

Bluesky serves a similar purpose to X but is designed completely differently, as Wang describes: “No single entity has control over the platform, all the code is open-sourced, anyone can copy and paste our entire code. We can’t own your data, you can take it wherever you want. We have to win your usership through our performance or else you will leave. That’s much more like how search engines work. If you enshittify the search engine by placing ads everywhere, people will go to a different search engine.”

The main hurdle has been that people migrate in packs and until recently weren’t migrating fast enough. If they do, and Saperia is right, Bluesky and Threads (which now has 175 million active monthly users), will ultimately supplant X. Will it be the same? It can’t be – the free-for-all of the open web, from which Twitter created its famous “town square” discursive experience (anyone could chat, and look, the Coastguard Agency and CNN were also right there) has been replaced by a social media idea Saperia calls the “dark forest” and Wang describes as “you find your people in small spaces, and work together to build an experience that you want – basic human building blocks of interaction”.

I understand the argument that all the "good" people leaving X will only amplify the voices of the "bad" people on the platform, but alternatives like Bluesky won't survive if no one uses them. So ultimately I would say that the more ethical choice is to leave X and support a better competitor rather than stay and prolong its legitimacy. It's not a perfect solution and will further segment society in the short-term but I don't see how remaining on X contributes to a better future.