Bluesky: an announcement

Don't you know, it's a beautiful new day

I’ve got some important news to share with you, my subscribers. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided that I won’t be joining Bluesky. For some reason, I apparently have to make an announcement about this to you all, ideally in the same sad tone that a newsreader would use to mark the passing of a national treasure. So here goes.

Goodness knows I’m not a fan of Musk Twitter. The very first post I mailed out on this site two years ago was to register my concern that promoting paid blue ticks over valuable content would degrade the user experience there for everyone. Over a year ago I explained why paying people to generate engagement would likely cause a collapse in posting quality. Both of these have been key issues in the ongoing enshittification of the site, so I feel like I was entirely right on both counts.

This makes me sad. COVID Twitter was a great place. All around the world we were all locked in our houses for months at a time, but we found common cause and a community online. Beyond that, it was really a meritocratic place: if you were nerdy enough and had something interesting to say, you were in. And it’s extremely striking that some of the best contributions came from outside the established order: some people without PhDs had a better strike rate than a lot of tenured professors. It was fashionable to sneer at “armchair epidemiologists”, but actually as

Adam Kucharski

argues there were many useful contributions coming from outside academia, from risk managers, data journalists, actuaries and other numerate people who could work a data set.

All that is gone now.

But I think that was always inevitable: once we got the vaccines, once we adjusted to the omicron world where our calibration of what large infection numbers could do to the health system, COVID just wouldn’t be a pressing issue any more.

But the current “Xodus” (ha ha, oh my aching sides) has a specific cause. The charge is that Musk has bought an election and a President, he’s built a platform full of hate, and that anyone who stays is complicit in that. And of course I can see that argument.

But I think a fragmentation of social media into a liberal and a conservative platform would be disastrous, particularly if the liberal platform were to be smaller. Sure, maybe Betamax was better than VHS, but if a group of intellectuals and opinion formers had formed their own parallel Blockbuster to only rent out Betamax art films, do you think the history of Hollywood would have been any different?

Indeed, we’ve seen the effects of fragmentation and deliberate forming of social media bubbles in the UK. After the 2016 Brexit Referendum, many former Remainers formed themselves into a tight-knit online community called FBPE. Within that bubble, it maybe seemed completely logical and coherent to be arguing for a second referendum, but from the outside, the whole world of following Femi, of stanning EU Supergirl, of berets with stars on, seemed kind of crazy. And people inside the bubble only interacting with people who agreed with them, and hence not understanding they were a small minority, led to the overconfidence of the Second Referendum movement in daring Boris to hold the 2019 election. Tell me how that worked out?

So I honestly think a Bluesky community only talking to itself, reassuring themselves constantly that they are the better people and ignoring normies, is the best road to President Vance winning in 2028. If you judge yourself against an impossible purity spiral then you end up with a scenario like Kamala Harris not reaching out to the country via the Rogan podcast for fear of upsetting her own staffers. You need to talk to the median voter: they aren’t a bad person.

Of course, there is a lot of hate on Twitter. It’s probably worse than it was, or at least more visible. Like the Guardian I’d be happier if Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Britain First and the rest of them weren’t earning Elon bucks. But equally there’s lots of other hate in other directions.

Symbols are symbols, and are open to interpretation. But if I see someone posting a swastika online, Occam’s Razor says that they aren’t using it as an Indian symbol. In the same way, if someone added a parachute emoji to their username on 8th October last year, it’s fair to assume that they were revelling in and celebrating the rape and murder of hundreds of party-goers at the Nova massacre.

A red triangle is a red triangle. But when they are banned on Facebook and the Anti-Defamation League says “the inverted red triangle is now used to represent Hamas itself and glorify its use of violence”, people shouldn’t be under any illusions about the way that they are used. And I’ve almost never seen people call out the use of this symbol, it’s on banners at marches and all the rest of it.

So sure, leave Twitter and join Bluesky because of the hate. But at least be honest that some forms of hate seem to get a free pass on Twitter, while others are called out much more consistently. And as long ago as 2016 or earlier, people were concerned about Nazis on Twitter, so we shouldn’t act as if this is a new problem which only started under the current ownership.

Like I say, I’m not planning to move. I don’t honestly have the time or the inclination to try to create yet another social media profile. I’m happy writing stuff on Substack, my subscriber numbers and engagement are fine. I put more serious work things on LinkedIn. But if you do go over to The Other Place, do pop back and say hi occasionally.