It seemed like a lot of people were leaving X for Bluesky after the 2024 US election results, even some celebrities were posting goodbye tweets on their profiles. But that was short-lived and people either came back to X or just deleted all their social media. What went wrong for Bluesky?

I'm on Bluesky, and it's much better than that monstrosity Muskrat has.

I think the issue is that a lot of people who were very invested in X/Twitter have already built a lot of connections or groups there which makes it more difficult to transition if not all of those people are willing to do the same

BSky still hass its niche audience, not huge but it's there.

Making a carbon copy of a platform that was already long past its peak was never going to be a huge success. Nowadays most people want video content, not text based content

Brand names are SO important

YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook.... BlueSky

Bluesky just doesn't have the same ring and doesn't sound iconic

Twitter has had a series of great updates… unfortunately

Automatic translation has been a game changer it will always be the place to get live updates

Honestly, I still use Bluesky almost as much as I use Twitter. I don't really use either that much these days other than to get news and see some funny posts, but still, the vibe is a lot more relaxed and nicer over there, for the most part. Every time I use Twitter lately I feel like I'm having to block or mute multiple accounts getting suggested onto my timeline.

And I personally feel a lot more comfortable posting thirst traps/gym progress pics and my thoughts on music and movies on Bluesky given the much smaller user base and the lower likelihood that some anonymous stan account will quote my post to call me ugly, tell me to kill myself, and dox me or whatever.

When push came to shove, nobody wanted to compromise the following they built and the p0rn they saved

24 minutes ago, Solaria said:

I think the issue is that a lot of people who were very invested in X/Twitter have already built a lot of connections or groups there which makes it more difficult to transition if not all of those people are willing to do the same

This, a whole bunch left for bluesky but more people stayed so I have to be on both to talk to who I wanna and I get no engagement on bluesky anyway so less inclined to post there.

I use twitter way less now and I just block most people. It's a me and my little gaggle of friends space at this point.

Edited April 19Apr 19 by Mikeymoonshine

i'm on bluesky and tbh the 2024 election was the beginning of the end, the big influx of posters was largely boring centrist democrats who spend all day posting bad anti trump memes, who then started wars with the already obnoxious and obsessive leftposters and that's the backbone of the site now

on top of that there's no algorithm, which sounds nice to start with but in the end it means that you don't actually see other groups you don't know and instead tend to stay within yr own space so those micro communities never really grow a lot. it's like lots of tiny forums all dwindling away over time.

the excessive focus on politics is also a big turn off. there are lots of accounts who moan about no one posting about pop culture and then go back to dribbling on about trump and starmer all day, these people are a menace

that said i look at twitter every so often for about 30 seconds, the politics is fash, the pop culture is ATRL but about 10x worse, for all its issues bluesky is relatively calm. i wonder if we're going to see text based social media die out all together soon and it'll all just be tik tok style things

I forgot my password on BlueSky

I think the issue was that it kind of felt like an echo chamber and had a very similar crowd to Facebook

Definitely the audience and the culture they established with all those invites they sent before the average X/Twitter could cross over - the general funny Twitter account didn't make it to BlueSky before the aging blue check media person past their prime. Also, as contentious as Twitter is, discourse and arguments drive engagement - that's why they always push controversial tweets to your "for you" timeline.

Then there's the fact that there were no trends right away, you have to sub into different topics. Personally, I found the inability to make a private account and then having Google Translate pop me out of the app anytime I tried to translate a post was very jarring. I just don't think the UI was set up in a more appealing way than Twitter's, and that was after Elon took a sledgehammer to a lot of Twitter's good stuff.

It had a weird crowd. Very LinkedIn vibes. I didn't like it and preferred the schizophrenic MAGA's on X.

It's nearly impossible to create a viable rival to twitter, instagram, youtube etc. These apps are too established and too ingrained in our day to day life for people to make a definite change. It needed to be real upgrade, but all that Bluesky offered was that it was more "woke" than post-Elon X and that doing the migration was a form of protest. It's just not enough of a selling point

43 minutes ago, Obsession said:

Personally, I found the inability to make a private account and then having Google Translate pop me out of the app anytime I tried to translate a post was very jarring. I just don't think the UI was set up in a more appealing way than Twitter's

the UI is dire and i'm sure the way that they've been assembling it on the fly has put loads of people off.

a lot of it has been done with the focus on decentralisation and apparently this makes it really hard to do things like DMs (which took ages), private accounts etc, but ofc that's the stuff people care about (astonishingly enough)

echo chambers never work

I like Bluesky...there's a great selection of creators I enjoy to watch on there.

Threads ate it up. Much larger active user base than BlueSky.

It's a shitty early Twitter copy that only appeals to the far left (that also acts as a huge echo chamber because of that).

Edited April 19Apr 19 by Cole

I think Bluesky had and still has a lot of improvements to make with some of its features. However, it is generally a much nicer, calmer, more user-friendly platform that is not algorithm-focused like Twitter/X has been. Plus... connection and history established on Twitter/X do not want to be lost... especially when if you don't log in after a certain time, you are locked out indefinitely.

Bluesky is solid for pure news from media outlets, but in terms of the actual community, it kind of has an annoying cringe lib we-don't-know-how-to-have-fun vibe

Edited April 19Apr 19 by WildAmerican

They spent too long in close invite mode. The platform is also missing some fundamental twitter functionalities. I personally don't use it because they flagged my account as spam and when I appealed they asked for personal data to prove I'm human. How lame is that

For me there's really no difference between X, Bluesky and Threads. I only had to browse for a little bit to find funny and entertaining accounts on Bluesky and form a nice timeline. I have a Threads account too and I could use that if I wanted. Don't miss X at all. I remember when memes and news stories would blow up on twitter and everyone would be kind of on the same page. Things like milkshake duck and such. Those days are long gone. There's zero FOMO for not being on X