The Right Has a Bluesky Problem
The Right Has a Bluesky Problem
The X exodus is weakening a way for conservatives to speak to the masses.
Some key excerpts:
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all
For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.
After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.
In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X.
As each wave departs X, the site gradually becomes less valuable to those who stay, prompting a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.
Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social.
Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience.
This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them. The fringier, vanguard segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.
Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.
The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling.
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On one hand great, on the other hand it would be great of Mastadon was the Twitter replacement instead of another proprietary non-fediverse service.
It won't be for a few reasons:
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Most of it is explicitly anti-commercial in the sense that most users want to get to know other users not just their work
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Folks keep introducing it in a way that is difficult for new users to understand
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Having said that federation can be difficult to understand if you aren't seeing others and don't get why
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There are no algorithms, full text search or indexing which most users from commercial social media want, but we don't for privacy and anti-commercial reasons.
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Quite a bit of mastodon cares more about sustainability and community than upping their numbers so most of the non spammy, well moderated servers have registrations closed or reviewed (or whatever it is called) and most people might find that difficult to deal with.
I use both and Mastodon is missing a lot of the quality of life features of Bluesky.
- Good user verification
- Add lists
- Block lists
- Subscribable topic feeds
- Configurable algorithms
These things make Bluesky very easy to get started with and more powerful even than Xitter was. It's simply a better product if you have any requirements other than federation.
I wish it were otherwise, but that's just the way it is.
all those features except shitty algorithms already exists on Mastodon. if Mastodon had algorithms i'd be the first one to leave. There is nothing, and i mean, absolutely nothing, worse than a computer telling you what you want to be exposed to; because it's sole purpose is to generate engagement and drive addiction and to fuck with what you actually want to see and engage with on your own terms. People think reddit died at the blackouts but if you do a search engine search for a question and include reddit in the search, you'll never find an answer at most less than 3 to 4 years old; usually in the range of 6-7 years old, because that's when reddit was at its peak before its slow fall out of relevance; and it coincided with algorithms pushing for engagement rather than running on self curated content with stuff users actually genuinely care about and want to be involved with.
anyone who thinks they want algorithms have no idea what algorithms do. people who dismiss self curation have no idea how to use the internet. self curated content has actual content value and a quick google on any topic would tell you pretty much anything you ever needed to know about algorithm manipulated content (it has zero value to anyone except the wallet of a handful few).
How is user verification done?
You put a snippet of code on your website.
Ah, so exactly like Mastodon.
And if you don't have or perhaps want a website?
Does verification do anything?
Does it create haves and have nots?
It does nothing. Verification is only important in general for public individuals, anyway. Public officials, celebrities, etc. Those people have the means to do it. They also have the means to host their own instance on their own domain, or on a government domain, which is even better verification of identity.
But most of us do not need to give a damn.
It just gives you a checkmark, nothing else AFAIK.
Tyranica moderation, meaning onerous decision of which instance you join will restrict the range of your permitted opinions. And lastly, no real way to migrate your account without damaging your relationships and reputation. Again making the instance decision very important.
This combined with infective content discovery means mastodon will remain a niche nerdtoy clubhouse
It'll stop being 'tyranica' when users stop being racist etc and harassing others, until then the good instances will keep banning and blocking those that won't do anything about it.
Also, spam is a problem on open instances.
Edit: How do you do 'content discovery' without violating people's consent or opening them up to harrasment?
Mastodon, at least from where I look is doing fine and I couldn't be happier with the moderation or community I have found there, most of them not at all tech obsessives.
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it is proprietary, but it's worth noting that bsky is also federated, so it is less centralized than e.g. xitter. it uses a different protocol than mastodon and i don't know many details about it, so unfortunately this is about the extent that i can speak on it
edit: it looks like you can get more details from others in this thread
Federated Soon™. Last I heard it was placeholder code.
Here's a really good blogpost (and followup thread) outlining the differences of atproto vs activitypub (from one of the original authors of activitypub).
It got a friendly "acknowledged, we're working on it" reply from pfrazee, one of the lead bsky devs.
Saying "Bluesky is federated" is like saying "you can make pizza without preprocessed ingredients". Yeah, you could plant veggies and grains and raise cows and collect cheese curds, but literally no one will ever do this, or could do so feasibly unless they already had a farm.
Last I heard, you'd have to sync 4 terabytes of data just to get started, and technically the interoperability code still isn't ready.
It's actually easier to make the scratch pizza starting from seeds and baby animals.