They are whispering about it loud enough for everybody to hear, with what can only be described as humble brag energy, “Have you moved yet?” It is familiar in how every few months somebody asks me, are you on because we are all looking for the next small thing which will be the next big thing.
I joined Bluesky in 2021, when it was just setting itself up as a scrappy little startup that was going to challenge the centralised Big Tech companies which trap us into a Stockholm Syndrome. We develop intimate and inescapable emotional ties with these platforms that abuse, exploit, and sometimes actively harm us. At the same time, I also made accounts on Mastodon, Diaspora, and Minds. And then immediately forgot all about them, despite the utopian promise of how these will help me escape Big Tech into a community-owned, self-governed space.
My password bank is a testimony to more than 80 different accounts I created on different platforms, each promising to be a big thing. Some died digital deaths without ever releasing. Some got taken over by the companies they were resisting. Some morphed into their evil doppelgangers, wreaking more havoc than what we were escaping from. When the sudden mass exodus started, as people made dramatic declarations that they are leaving Twitter and moving to Bluesky, I hesitantly opened my dormant Bluesky account to find about 700 people who have found and followed me. I haven’t yet figured out if I will follow them back.
My interactions with Twitter were limited even before things went down the crapper and came out as X. Let me change that, my interactions with Twitter were limited because I had only experienced it as toxic, problematic, hate-filled and uncaring. Sure, there were friends and their witty repartees, colleagues who live-tweeted conferences and events, and the joy of hopping on a hashtag and riding it with joy, but those moments were exceptional rather than the norm. Even before Elon Musk unleashed hordes of trolls on X, for many, it was essentially a dangerous space — filled with surveillance, risk, and potential of abuse. For as many folks who have found X’s architecture useful to mobilise for social good and social justice, I can name and count disproportionately more people who have been hurt by it.
In the aftermath of the US elections, as many liberal and progressive people sought something to clutch on to, leaving X and finding solace in the echo chambers of Bluesky feels comforting. It feels like we are doing something. But for those of us who were outside the realm of digital care in how we were subjected to hate, it is difficult to share this moment as the moment where we migrate. If we have survived so far, we will be fine going forward.
I appreciate all the technical implementation that has gone into the architecture of Bluesky — the promise of federated servers, the safeguards against hate speech, and a more humane ranking and recommendation system that is not at the mercy of profit-making algorithms. I can see why the promise of starting again — albeit with the same people, and without direct contact with others — is alluring. And yet, I am considering not doing anything actively on Bluesky. I have three reasons for it.
First, I don’t see any of the communities which are now actively declaring their commitment to better platforms doing much when people who were being impacted by them were not like them. X, and Twitter before it, has had a long and checkered history of neglect, exploitation, and platforming hatred towards people in other parts of the world, and people who were underserved. These migrating folks have been at least silent, if not complicit, in letting this and other big-tech platforms continue putting others in harm, even as they now try and fortify their safe spaces of conversation.
Second, there is no guarantee that BS (sorry, I couldn’t resist the acronymisation at least once) will not go down the path of other platforms who have also made grand declarations in the past only to be pressured into compromising at the behest of shareholders, funders, and politicians. Much as I want to believe the proclamations that BlueSky is making, of how it will never do evil, I remember putting trust in another behemoth that once worked under the motto of “Do no evil”, and then turned on us.
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Third, and this is perhaps the most important one, I am tired of performing the labour of recreating networks, intimacies, connections, relationships, yet again. Sure, I found the tools that allow me to directly import all my X followers to BS. I can see that the conversations are already starting, which would excite and entice me. However, I am not sure if I want to trap myself on yet another platform where we will develop our networks of weak ties for the platform to eventually profit.
This move to BlueSky doesn’t feel like migration. It feels like divorce. I had no love lost for X. Like many others, I am happy to step out of this toxic relationship and put this connection to an end. But like sage dating advice, I am not going to swipe right and hook up with BlueSky on a rebound. I am happy to consider a life without this platform and see if things are dramatically different. Right now, I have a Bluesky account. It is empty. I am kind of enjoying the silence — of not reading, but also, of not saying anything.
The writer is professor of Global Media at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society, Harvard University, USA
