> Bluesky, other Twitter-like replacements, and why they'll disappear
> LINK · 'Nostalgia will not fix this' by Ryan Broderick
A fascinating article, eulogising the slow fragmenting of the Twitter X experience, the boon in Bluesky users, and how it's all ultimately fruitless anyway.
Two choice extracts:
I do find Bluesky grating for the same reason I find Portland, Oregon, kind of grating. A sort of ragged tweeness that permeates the whole place and makes it feel like a millennial retirement home. As X user @JeremiahWiggles recently wrote, “It does tickle me that there's a functional twitter alternative that is viable in almost every respect except for the fact that it's culture is just mid-2010s Tumblr.”
...gotta be honest, that sounds amazing to this forty-something curmudgeon.
But Bluesky's the bottom of the pile for me. Threads has the network effect of being closely aligned to Instagram and Facebook, Mastodon's more flexible and innovative.
Bluesky's just another startup which will pivot to ad-based monetisation and if their product is just 'what if Twitter, but old Twitter', what's the point?
Every text-first platform on the web right now is running up against an internet-wide literacy wall. Unless something truly miraculous happens, it is reasonable to assume that every day there will be fewer people reading words on the internet than there were the day before. Bluesky has around six million monthly active users. Threads has 150 million gas leak victims — though its algorithm will never let you see them all. X has 250 million. But TikTok has over a billion. We are experiencing a shift in communication as existential as climate change with ripple effects just as varied and unpredictable. But what is already very apparent is that nostalgia will not fix this. Bluesky has built a better version of what Twitter used to be, but if it wants to actually build a better version of what Twitter could be, it needs to evolve into something else entirely.
Personally I'm all in on Mastodon, a platform not even mentioned by Ryan. Mastodon's both an even more retro Twitter (hey ma, no algorithms!) and a forward-looking protocol designed to link all sorts of resources together rather than just tweet-like posts. It feels like a greater opportunity to do something remarkable to me.