On Twitter and Bluesky

Social media is bad, but you already knew that

The liberal exodus from Twitter/X, which has seen millions of people ditching the platform and migrating to Bluesky, has been met with various forms of derision from those who remain behind. Conservatives have mocked their fleeing adversaries for taking their discursive ball and going home, for being unable to stand the heat of battle and retreating to the ‘safe space’ that Bluesky apparently provides. Meanwhile, the left-liberals still gripped by their Twitter habit have pleaded forlornly for their faltering comrades to ‘stay and fight’, and not cede this online space to the right.

Users of all political persuasions have long been conditioned to treat Twitter not as an information hub, but as an ideological battleground, in which ideas are calcified into ammunition to deploy against belligerents. And so, this split has been interpreted as a territorial shift: the right think they have won, the stay-behind left feel that they have lost.

But this is all just insular pretension. This ideological ‘war’ is pointless, demonstrative of little beyond the extent to which politically-minded social media users have grossly overestimated what can be ‘achieved’ on these platforms.

I'm sure there are instances of Bluesky users exhibiting an inflated sense of purpose, mainly expressed through delusions of thwarting Elon Musk’s plans for their old ‘home’^⁠¹. But I’ve been under the impression that most people leaving Twitter are doing so simply because it no longer works properly. Dissatisfaction with the platform is not primarily political, but rather due to its ongoing 'enshittification’: a process that, while certainly having accelerated under Musk,^⁠² was underway long before he ever acquired it.

The features that allowed a platform like Twitter to apparently serve as ‘the world’s digital town square’ are no longer present. As is the common trajectory for platforms built on the back of user-generated content, useful features are prioritised only insofar as they compel people to become ‘stuck’ on the platform. Once the audience is captive, and the need to turn a profit becomes impossible to deny, usability is sacrificed, piecemeal, in order to best meet the needs of the true clients of social media companies: advertisers. One should never forget that users of social media are not the customer – they’re the product.

This, more than any other factor, is how Twitter became ‘unusable’. You cannot share^⁠³ useful ideas or valuable work on a platform that deliberately throttles external links to discourage people from ever leaving.^⁠⁴ You cannot connect with people on a platform whose ‘follower’-based model of sociality has been supplanted by the algorithmically-generated, achronological slurry of the ‘For You’ feed.

Clearly, Twitter has reached that point in the platform lifecycle where it no longer serves the purpose that attracted people to it in the first place. Until recently this process was so incremental as to be imperceptible to many: enshittification is the decay of a service’s usability, rather than a collapse. On-site activity remains strong simply through habit, despite the original utilitarian ‘need’ no longer being fulfilled. Endemic flaws become more widely apparent in periods of crisis, where the detrimental impact upon one’s wellbeing caused by, say, once-banned users being permitted to return, causes a jolt that snaps users out of their reliant stupor – like addicts whose supply has been momentarily disrupted.

In this sense, conceiving of the Twitter–Bluesky split as a political rupture is not quite right. The main difference between those who have moved to Bluesky and those who have remained on Twitter is that the former have noticed this process occurring, while the latter either haven’t or are so lost to their habit that they don’t care.

It’s always tempting to think of social media as a decrepit public utility. It’s become so essential for the normal functioning of everyday life that it really should be socialised, yet is stuck in the hands of private owners with no incentive to provide an adequate service. The migration to Bluesky, in this analogy, is akin to switching to a different service provider in the hope of getting a better experience.

But this line of thinking is not quite right, because the entire concept of social media is inherently unable to serve its assumed purpose. The ‘social industry’ simulates communicative essentials, but cannot ever truly deliver on them. The only service such platforms provide is a sating of the desire for communication, not communication itself. The purpose of social media is to get people to use social media: the ‘attention economy’ has little to do with communication, journalism, activism or any of the other noble deeds it was once assumed to help facilitate.

And so, Bluesky is unsatisfying as a clone of Twitter,^⁠⁵ because Twitter too was ultimately unsatisfying, even when it was ‘good’. It would be a mistake to think that a simple switch to a different platform – especially one that earnestly reproduces the shortcomings of its predecessor – will make for a more edifying discursive culture. Even an idealised version of social media cannot fully provide that which it promises: news gathering, social connection, political organising. There are no circumstances in which it delivers on what it simulates with enough verisimilitude that its use becomes worthwhile.

For starters, the social media feed is an incredibly inefficient way of consuming information. It requires users to navigate an infinite scroll, presented in tiny chunks, with each monadic post bearing no coherent relation to the next. For the data-hungry reader, it feels like news gathering at a lightning pace. But it’s not. It’s numbing and bewildering, the constant context switching obliterating your ability to concentrate. It would be far more cognitively productive to read with more depth, one topic at a time, than attempt to absorb every topic at once, one snippet at a time. But this is not what social media offers.

Relatedly, Twitter-like platforms incentivise the incessant cranking-out of content, with everyone flooding each other’s feeds with interminable chunks of information. Some of it may be useful, most of it is banal, but the algorithm can never satisfactorily differentiate, leaving all users to wade through the resultant mire in the hope of finding something valuable. It is, in other words, a gigantic waste of time.

Social media companies are equally useless in supporting actually-existing social spaces, in which meaningful relationships can be built between fully formed human beings. The rewarding of ‘numbers’ – the dopamine spike that hits whenever one of these posts becomes popular – causes people to cultivate their personal ‘brand’. People start chasing the high they get from eliciting certain responses, streamlining themselves in order to most efficiently yield ‘engagement’. Actual personalities are whittled down into vague approximations: loose assemblages of traits and interests that happen to resonate with one’s ‘followers’. Everyone who posts on social media does this, often without realising. As a result, users are ‘socialising’ not with fully formed human beings, but with their uncanny online avatars.^⁠⁶

As you might expect, this lack of real social space has proven itself, over and over again, to be an utterly useless environment for building lasting and successful political movements, especially on the left. This says as much about the nature of political struggle as it does social media. Platforms that are designed to provide such ‘personalised’ – and so atomised, individuated – experiences might be fertile ground for the tenets of right-wing politics (and indeed Twitter is proving this right before our eyes), but it can never be conducive to the community-building that left-wing movements require. Instead, it can only produce a perverted, ultimately reactionary bastardisation of leftist politics: lots of narcissism and scolding, little in the way of actual organising or consciousness-raising.

The problem remains, however, that people still need communication, connection, community – everything that social media simulates, and which modern life so often precludes. The scarcity of these needs being met is precisely why they are so valuable, and why the means of supply are so coveted by the captains of the social industry.

People desire actually-existing means of communication, and more fulfilling means of acquiring information. Social media platforms simply aren’t up to the task of providing these anymore – it’s likely that they never were in the first place. We must build, or return to, more viable alternatives. The rubric for this is quite simple: for consuming information, RSS; for producing, POSSE.

Social media feeds are, in essence, incredibly inefficient RSS readers. It would be far better, then, to use an actual RSS reader than continue to rot your brain with degenerate imitators. A carefully curated feed, of thoughtfully produced content, is far more productive and efficient than navigating a mess of a feed littered with low-friction slop. If you’re new to this, there are plenty of guides online to setting something up. Cory Doctorow’s ‘You should be using an RSS reader’ is as good a place to start as any, as is the brief introduction contained within Paul Watson’s ‘British Weird RSS Starter Pack’.

As for producing work yourself: if you’re going to write online, contributing to an established publication, or working as part of a collective, remain the ideal options. Doing so nurtures the collaboration, sociality and cross-pollination of ideas so critical for effective socially-useful writing (not to mention availing oneself of the expertise and experience of others when it comes to editing, part of the process sorely missing in solo endeavours, as I’m demonstrating right now with this unnecessary parenthetical aside). If this isn’t feasible – and unfortunately the challenges of maintaining said publications are not going away – the ‘POSSE’ principle is worth abiding by: publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere. Own your work, keep your thinking free of algorithmic compromises, put as little of yourself in the hands of corporate platforms as possible. Give others the ability to add your work to their RSS reader, and the cycle can continue.

Using these solutions, there is a decent chance that ideas can be communicated in ways that are actually valuable. From there, perhaps, we’ll have a shot at re-building an actually-existing social sphere, both online and beyond.

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(This article was originally published at disposableeverything.com)

1. ‘Some are joining Bluesky with a vengeful “that’ll teach ya” attitude towards Musk, posting about him constantly and referring to X as “the other place”’

(

Emma Garland

, ‘Have capitalists killed the internet?’, Huck)

2. ‘Under Musk’s leadership, X has throttled traffic to links, brought back racist accounts, created incentives to share falsehoods and scared advertisers away. Musk has boosted his own account, shared falsehoods often, and discredited journalists by sharing dozens of posts against them every month.’

(Gretel Kahn, ‘These reporters wrote a book on Musk’s Twitter takeover. Here’s what they think is next for journalism and X’, The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism)

3. 'Link culture, once a pillar of the open web, has collapsed under the weight of endless scrolling.'

(Jay Springett, ’Have Some Ambition’, thejaymo)

4. ‘It’s all in service of engagement, of more time on site. Musk, who has transformed X into a superfund site of conspiracy theorizing, crypto ads, hateful posts, and low-rent memes, has been vehement that he wants his users to come to the platform and never leave. He has allegedly deprioritized hyperlinks that would take people away from the platform to other sites.’

(Charlie Warzel, ‘Beyond Doomscrolling’, The Atlantic)

5. 'I wish I could tell you that Bluesky is a utopia of digital rainbows, a thriving garden of new connections and ideas. But honestly, after a this week, I’ve realised something—it’s kind of… sad. Not sad in a tragic way, but in a melancholic, quiet sort of way, like wandering into an old pub where everyone is trying to rekindle a vibe that’s already burned out.'

(Jay Springett, ‘Have Some Ambition’, thejaymo)

6. ‘Watching people I respect modulate their personalities to go viral fills me with a certain disgust, like watching your former drinking buddies go on stumbling around now that you’re sober. A little distance, and you see the illusions for what they are. Suddenly the whole thing gets repulsive.’

(

Patrick Nathan

, ‘Time for a Little Anarchy’, Entertainment, Weakly)