The grass is always bluer on the other side

And everyone hates you already even before you get there

There’s a saying that social networks aren’t airports or train stations: you aren’t actually obliged to announce your departure. As a saying, it’s usually said to those who announce their departure from whichever network it is. In fact, it’s usually eX-Twitter, because who’s going to announce their departure from Facebook, the Hotel California of social networks? The only real way to leave that is to die. As for Instagram, temporarily embarrassed influencers may say they’re “taking a break”, but there’s no way they’d abandon it; for many that’s an important source of income, and do you see any other photo- and video-based social networks with a billion users around? (Yes, OK, TikTok, but one assumes the intent is to be on both.)

What’s been notable this past week has been the influx of users to Bluesky, and whatever the opposite is—exflux? Effusion?—from Elon Musk’s platform. It got to the point where it was quite hard to keep up with all the announcements. Clifton Suspension Bridge! (Aprés vous, le deluge.) The Guardian! Actually, speaking as someone who worked there and was quite involved in finding good (and sometimes bad) ways of using Twitter, as it then was, the Guardian’s announcement struck me as a bit odd.

We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.

This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.

Yes, but you’re a news organisation. Your job is to counter the toxicity and promote accurate information. (This is achieved by getting people to come to the site and give you money and/or see adverts.) If you don’t post on a site, you don’t get any chance to influence the discourse there. And the Guardian’s accounts were really big: the Guardiantech account, for Guardian Technology, was one of the first on there (congrats Bobbie Johnson) and has 2.3 million followers, many gained in the early days of the site when it was one of the recommended follows. The Guardian account has 10.8m followers. This is not nothing. Posting the same message on multiple platforms is a doddle these days with modern social media tools, and it’s not as if the Guardian’s accounts were wildly interactive: they posted their stories and that was it. Meanwhile the Guardian’s journalists can still gather material and (if they like?) post on it. So it seems more like a middle finger aimed at Musk than anything else. He, meanwhile, doesn’t care. “It’s irrelevant” he posted in response.

So anyway, everyone’s packing up and going over to Bluesky. It must surely be the most wonderful place in social networking, right? Happy and welcoming of differences of opinion because now nobody is in thrall to The Bad For You Algorithm, right?

Ehh, well. Here’s Helen Lewis writing in The Atlantic back in July 2023, when Bluesky was still invite-only:

As far as I can tell, Bluesky is siphoning off both Twitter’s most emotionally dysregulated users and its most committed shitposters. I dare not post there—my account was briefly the most blocked on the app, according to a tracking service—but it’s nice to see that a small, tight-knit, and politically distinctive community has formed, albeit around shared interests that include hating me. Although it is a mere fraction of the size of the big social networks, Bluesky appears to have hit the critical mass needed to sustain itself, suggesting that Elon Musk’s actions at Twitter have irreparably fractured the service. We are now living in the post-Twitter era, literally and metaphorically.

The “most blocked”? Yup: because she has written about trans issues, and not necessarily approvingly, she became a cause monstre.

Fast forward a year and you’d have to say that Bluesky has retained a lot of that character. The existence of big blocklists and the visibility of people’s Twitter/X history means that you can be judged well before you arrive. Some people have found the (unusual) handle they wanted to use appropriated; it’s hard to see that as anything but a passive-aggressive act to block them making an easy transfer from one to the other.

Then there was Benjamin Ryan’s experience. Ryan is a science and medicine freelance journalist based on the US east coast, who (because he’s gay) has written about topics such as HIV and Mpox (previously monkeypox) with particular interest. In the past year he has also focussed on the gender affirming care topic. He’s always carefully neutral while also not shying away from facts; when people say stuff that isn’t true he calls them out on it.

Anyway, a few days ago Ryan posted this screenshot:

“Known racist and transphobe”?? It’s completely untrue. But of course on social networks, who needs proof? The accusation is the proof. The reason for the wild claim, Ryan explains, is that back in July 2022 when people were fretting that Mpox was spreading between people, he pointed out that the “outbreak” was limited to gay and bi men, and was spread through anal sex. Mukerjee classed this (extremely factual) reporting as “homophobic propaganda”, neatly ignoring the fact that Ryan himself might have a stake in being correct on this.

Not that Ryan had had the easiest of weeks on eX-Twitter: his insistence on calling trans women “she” and trans men “he”, on the basis that he thinks that’s just good manners, ignited an absolute firestorm of people telling him he was wrong, stupid, stupid and wrong, ugly stupid and wrong, and also wrong. (He muted the replies, which was probably wise given they passed the 1,000 mark.)

Reflecting on the contrast between the two, he wrote:

“The other social media site [Bluesky] has an interesting culture. There’s a lot of hostile/aggressive policing going on by people who are guarding what they believe is the appropriate level of niceness. I’m already on scores on blacklists people can adopt to sweepingly block undesirables.”

So your choices are: get absolutely blitzed on X, or get blocked before you’ve managed to find your bearings on Bluesky. My impression of the latter is that the recent influx contains a lot of left-leaning Americans who are absolutely steaming angry about Kamala Harris’s loss, and a hefty dose of people who feel that X these days is just emptier and less interesting and so they’ll go over to a smaller, newer network and try the water there. The only downside is all the effort that has to go into rebuilding the network; even with tools such as Sky Follower Bridge you’re going to be slogging away for a while. And the lack of an algorithm can mean that it’s difficult to find new and interesting followers. (Bluesky is confusing in this regard, in my experience. They also need to build a better app for the iPad and the Mac given the pots of money they’ve just taken from VCs.)

But I think the experience of Ryan and Lewis demonstrates that just because a social network is new or nascent, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be milk and honey; there are snakes in the greener grass too. In fact the tendency for social networks to be versions of themselves at every scale—a fractal effect where the interactions at the individual account level are the same all the way up—seems to me to be the mark of a network. Because of course it’s implicit in the way the software is set up: if you can only interact with Instagram by posting a photo or video, or with TikTok via a video, that is going to determine the character of the network. If your new network lets people build humungous blocklists and share them widely, you will create lots of mutually antagonistic siloes. (This is a big part of why I don’t subscribe to blocklists. I’ve been on the internet a long time. Come at me if you think you’re hard or numerous enough.)

So is the grass greener on Bluesky? One would have to say that it’s looking browner on X: the number of defections of people who I used to find interesting, and the absence of fun little accounts posting fun stuff because API costs have rocketed, has made it less enticing. I don’t know what critical mass is for a social network, so couldn’t tell you how you know when it falls below it—I wasn’t on MySpace for the Great Flight To Facebook—but maybe watching will be fun. How do you know when the machine stops? Only by staying there until it does.

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