It had been like getting to a party before everyone else and hoping you’d picked the right shindig. But last week, quite suddenly, the whole gang turned up. People who’d been lurking announced themselves; whole groups walked in the door. The party was at Bluesky, the social media platform that looks a lot like Twitter, but isn’t.
The migration of perhaps a couple of thousand long-term NZ Twitter users to Bluesky had a proximate cause. Elon Musk, in the middle of a live-streamed chat with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aimed at damping down perceptions of his site as a haven for anti-Semitism – perceptions Musk himself has done as much as anyone to fuel – declared the company was “moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system”.
Musk, of course, wants everyone to call his site X, so calling it Twitter feels like a small act of resistance.
Ironically, Bluesky is the fruit of a research project launched in 2019 with the backing of Twitter’s founder and then CEO Jack Dorsey.
The prospect of paying a fee to tweet – to feed the owner’s folly – may have been the tipping point in driving people to the rival platform, but it was really a culmination of insults. The place is a party gone bad.
In 2021, the civil-society data-cruncher David Hood presented an intriguing thesis: that Twitter in New Zealand manifested in a more socially functional way than it did in other countries. In particular, the frequency of replies to tweets was several times greater than in, say, Australia. We tended to “talk it out”, Hood found. He added that “within New Zealand, Twitter is used as a lost-property office”.
It seemed that was what the Bluesky escapees were seeking to recover – a place to chat without the risk of a socially incontinent troll marching in to defecate on the conversation. “You won’t see nearly as much politics from me here,” posted an often-combative online friend, adding that he loved the sense he was recovering “the feeling that I had on the bird app around 2008-11″.
Someone I knew from Twitter posted a picture of a fresh-baked loaf and I complimented her on the retro Shacklock oven on which it sat. “Thank you,” she beamed. “And as you see still cooks well! I can’t seem to let it go!” There was a comforting air of nostalgia about many of the conversations.
It wasn’t just us. Irish newspaper columnist Darach Ó Séaghdha shared a column in which he hailed and farewelled “‘Irish Twitter’ … a unique and uniquely significant space which may not be replicated on another platform, and I resent the way it has been taken from us”. People shared memories of Irish Twitter’s greatest jokes, just for the craic.
All this was enough to make up for the fact that Bluesky is a work in progress. There are no direct messages, hashtags and gifs aren’t supported yet and there are various other quirks to be learnt. Many of us are still looking for our networks in specialist science and policy areas. It’s not clear how the venture will ultimately sustain itself.
But, for now, it is blessedly possible to read a post about climate change without the first five replies being from cavemen with blue ticks promoted to the top of the conversation by Musk’s order.
At the heart of it is that you can’t just join Bluesky; you need someone who’s already there to send you one of the invitations the site distributes every couple of weeks. This keeps growth manageable on a technical level (Bluesky has just gone past a million users), but also means that everyone there is trusted by someone.
It felt last week as if no one wanted to break anything by risking an argument. That will surely change.
But there was no harm in just relaxing for a little while. We can always be angry at the other place.