Elon Musk’s X finally has a true competitor — and it’s actually pretty great

Story by Zeeshan Aleem. November 17, 2024.

  • Mass Migration to Bluesky: Many users, including journalists, celebrities, and politicians, are leaving X (formerly Twitter) for Bluesky, a platform developed by Jack Dorsey that resembles early Twitter.
  • Discontent with X: Users are frustrated with X due to algorithm changes, excessive ads, bot problems, and a rise in abusive content.
  • Bluesky’s Appeal: Bluesky offers a simpler, more user-friendly experience with better tools for reducing harassment and a chronological feed.
  • Political and Social Dynamics: The shift is partly driven by dissatisfaction with Elon Musk’s management and perceived political biases on X.

Journalists are migrating there en masse. Celebrity actors and musicians are flooding in. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has joined the party, and the New York City mayor’s office is ordering agencies to set up camp. They’re calling it the #Xodus, and it’s happening fast.

Millions of social media junkies and power users are pivoting from using X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, to setting up accounts on Bluesky, a buzzy platform that resembles the earlier days of Twitter before Musk rendered it a far-right hotbed and a technically unusable mess.

Bluesky was developed in recent years by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, as a kind of open and decentralized alternative to Twitter. (Dorsey has since left the board of Bluesky.) In terms of the basic user experience and design of the site, it looks a lot like Twitter used to in the pre-Musk era. Bluesky had an invite-only beta launch in 2023, and in February, it became available to the general public. While it has grown throughout the year, it has seen a meteoric explosion in sign-ups after the election. And with media organizations and politicians now setting up accounts on the site, it looks like Bluesky is exuding “official new alternative to Twitter ” vibes.

There are a lot of reasons that people are fleeing X, and I don’t agree with all of them. But I can say my personal experience on the site since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 (after which he renamed it X) has been deeply disheartening, and at times enraging.

Changes to the algorithms and default user feed means I am constantly wading through a nauseating torrent of misinformation, rage bait, demagogic pundits, product placement for Musk’s other companies and imbecilic short videos that skew violent and prurient. The default feed is labeled “for you,” but compared to most social media I’ve used, the algorithm has no understanding of my interests. Instead, it’s just the most vulgar bid for generic user attention imaginable.

Beyond the disastrous “for you” feed, X has become insufferable to read. The company’s decision to shove as many ads as possible into the interface frequently makes it impossible to tell if I’m reading a post or an advertisement. (There is no evidence that the visual assault of ads has helped Musk recover the gigantic share of ad revenue he has lost as he has ruined the platform.) Despite the fact that one of Musk’s premises for buying Twitter was to improve the platform’s bot problem, bots now dominate the user experience on a level I’ve never experienced before on the site — or anywhere else I frequent on the internet. And Musk’s decision to gut Twitter’s verified badge policy has made it far harder for me to use the site to track reliable real-time reporting and separate rumor from fact. Musk has also said he downgrades the visibility of posts with links — because he doesn’t want people to leave the site — so posts linking to legitimate news articles get buried under clickbait posts. Meanwhile, Musk has tweaked the site’s algorithm to prioritize his own posts, amplifying his power as a colossal purveyor of misinformation and far-right propaganda.

As of late, it feels like posting is pointless. Despite having thousands of followers, the engagement on my posts has plunged, and my average post seems to disappear into the ether unnoticed. When I do get engagement, a good portion of the time it’s a bot.

That is, if it’s not a bigoted, disparaging remark. Due to a combination of Musk reinstating verified pro-Nazi accounts, the growing popularity of X as a platform for extremist and antisocial right-wingers, and his paring back of features and resources designed to reduce abuse, X has become a miserable place brimming with venomous racists, misogynists, transphobes and trolls of every stripe. While receiving profane insults and racism is something I’ve always experienced as a journalist, I’ve noticed a big uptick of it in my daily experience on X. This isn’t political dialogue, it’s just being on the receiving end of misanthropy and hatred.

This is not simply the cost of “free speech.” X does have anti-harassment policies and does suspend accounts for violating rules, it’s just that these rules are enforced poorly and unpredictably and are limited in their ability to mitigate a platform-wide culture of trolling. Moreover, Musk’s free speech narrative is a facade. Musk has shown a pattern of suspending accounts in a manner that appears to align with a right-wing political agenda. He also selectively upholds free-speech principles in different countries in a manner that reflects what could be his perceived political and business interests. And Musk’s decision to become an all-out Trump activist and to work with the Trump administration underscores that he is compromised as a independent arbiter of speech.

As X has slid into dysfunctionality and extreme unpleasantness, Bluesky has emerged as an attractive alternative. It represents a return to basic, commonsense principles of text-based social media. It’s easy to use and navigate, it has good tools for reducing harassment, the default feed is a simple chronological set of posts. Posts are not swarmed by porn bots, bigoted trolls, and strange native advertising. Even though I have a fraction of my old following on my new account at Bluesky, my engagement is already much higher.

Some people have tried criticizing the exodus from X as a desire for people on the left to retreat to “safe spaces” and ideological echo chambers. (Not everyone heading to Bluesky is on the left, but it’s a crowd that leans to the left overall.) I can say unequivocally that is not the case for me. I enjoy reading and talking with people across the political spectrum, and I would prefer to spend most my time on a platform with maximum ideological diversity. I’m not sick of X because it has people I disagree with on it. I’m sick of X because it sucks. A reactionary billionaire with no commitment to free speech or user experience has taken a wrecking ball1 to a once flawed but invaluable digital commons.

I haven’t sworn off using X entirely, but it won’t be a place I will invest as much time as I once did. Nor do I assume Bluesky will be a perfect haven — it is run by a corporation after all. But for now I’ll mostly read people across the political spectrum outside of X , and lean into having conversations online in a place that functions closer to the way a public square ought to.

  1. @RalphHightower: Much like Trump is taking a wrecking ball to America. ↩