Those on the right should give Bluesky a try

Forget about the ideology - it's just a much better platform

Right now there’s a major surge in people leaving Twitter¹ for a new-ish microposting platform, Bluesky. Over the last few days it’s been gaining over a million users a day, recently topping 20 million accounts and over 3 1/2 million daily users.

While initially this ‘X-odus’, like previous waves, was driven by people on the left who objected to Elon Musk’s ownership of the platform and/or his campaigning for Donald Trump’s election, over the last few days a much larger number of centrists or those on the right have joined, as well as far more journalists, MPs and others active in the politics/policy/media nexus.

As someone on the political right, this is why I think others on the right should give it a try - even if you don’t delete your Twitter² account just yet.

The ideological reasons given by some of the initial movers to Bluesky can tempt those of us who don’t share their politics to ignore them. It can look like people flouncing off because one social media company - out of all of them - is owned by someone they disagree with; because it’s refusing to censor lawful and mainstream views on the right that don’t conform to 21st century progressive orthodoxy; because the owner campaigned for a political candidate they disagreed with³. It’s all too easy to say, ‘Let them go create their woke echo chamber’.

But because of this, it’s too easy to forget just how much worse the user experience on Twitter has got since Musk took over. Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification’ to describe how social media platforms deteriorate, writing:

When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left…

…Companies that don’t have to worry about their users leaving — because of high switching costs and/or few competitors — can scoop up that surplus. They can pay fewer moderators to fight harassment, or spy on you more, or put more ads into your feed.

Once they have taken the surplus from you, they can allocate it to the advertisers who use their platforms — they can charge less to advertise to you, make it harder for you to skip ads, and so on. This brings in revenue, which gooses their share prices, and attracts more advertisers.

But all things being equal, the company would prefer that all the surplus would end up on its own balance sheet. Once you are locked in, and once advertisers are locked in, the companies can grab the surplus away from those advertisers, too. For example, companies can create their own products that directly compete with the ones that their advertisers offer, or they can rig the ad-buying market (as Google and Facebook did when they illegally colluded on a secret project called “Jedi Blue”).

The higher the switching costs, the more the social media companies can appropriate of that surplus — that is, the worse they can make things for both advertisers and users.

Cory Doctorow, 2022

I’ve seen this happen on Facebook, which is far inferior to the product it was just half a dozen years ago - let alone when it first began in the noughties. And Twitter is well on the way down that journey.

The 'blue tick' phenomenon mean that comments / replies have become truly awful. Ads seem to be increasing. Paying people to generate content has led to a collapse in quality. Really vile content - such as outright racist slurs directed at individuals - goes entirely unmoderated.

Suppression of external links is also a real bummer. I want to share things. And I want to read things others have shared too! Good interactive discussion had massively declined.

I block ruthlessly and never use 'for you', so I saw less of the abuse/horrible videos others speak of. But the overall deterioration of the user appeal is real.

Finally, partly because of Bluesky, lots of the interesting people who used to be on Twitter have left - or at least stopped using it much. That’s a big part of what makes any social media platform - and a big driver to move.

So, last Thursday evening I set up an account on Bluesky - and, I’ll be honest, the initial welcome blew me away. One of my biggest worries had been having to start again from the bottom in terms of followers, but Bluesky has a brilliant user-created feature called ‘starter packs’, where people can add you to a list (e.g. ‘centre right people’ or ‘education and skills’) which others can follow. Thanks to this, and some kind resharing, in five days I’m up to 3k followers - which compares very well to the 5.5k I had on Twitter⁴.

Empirically, too, I’ve been dual posting on both sites for a few days and in most cases have been getting more engagement on Bluesky⁵. Others have confirmed this is the same for them - including for politically neutral posts such as ‘Tomorrow’s Papers Today’.

Conversation is vastly better - I’d almost forgotten what it was like to comment on posts without a mass of spammy accounts being boosted by their ‘blue ticks’ in the comments. And because of this, people are happier to engage, whether it’s about tax and education policy or light hearteded subjects such as how to choose which team to support in University Challenge.

Bluesky also appears to be actively designing its structure with user wellbeing in mind. With growing recognition that social media use can be bad for users' mental health, I love to see a platform looking to build user wellbeing in from the start. Probably they'll get the odd thing wrong - but they get points just for trying.

So, what’s the downside? The steelman case against joining has been set out best by Oliver Johnson on his substack:

I think a fragmentation of social media into a liberal and a conservative platform would be disastrous, particularly if the liberal platform were to be smaller. Sure, maybe Betamax was better than VHS, but if a group of intellectuals and opinion formers had formed their own parallel Blockbuster to only rent out Betamax art films, do you think the history of Hollywood would have been any different?

…

So I honestly think a Bluesky community only talking to itself, reassuring themselves constantly that they are the better people and ignoring normies, is the best road to President Vance winning in 2028. If you judge yourself against an impossible purity spiral then you end up with a scenario like Kamala Harris not reaching out to the country via the Rogan podcast for fear of upsetting her own staffers. You need to talk to the median voter: they aren’t a bad person.

Of course, there is a lot of hate on Twitter. It’s probably worse than it was, or at least more visible. Like the Guardian I’d be happier if Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Britain First and the rest of them weren’t earning Elon bucks. But equally there’s lots of other hate in other directions.

Symbols are symbols, and are open to interpretation. But if I see someone posting a swastika online, Occam’s Razor says that they aren’t using it as an Indian symbol. In the same way, if someone added a parachute emoji to their username on 8th October last year, it’s fair to assume that they were revelling in and celebrating the rape and murder of hundreds of party-goers at the Nova massacre.

A red triangle is a red triangle. But when they are banned on Facebook and the Anti-Defamation League says “the inverted red triangle is now used to represent Hamas itself and glorify its use of violence”, people shouldn’t be under any illusions about the way that they are used. And I’ve almost never seen people call out the use of this symbol, it’s on banners at marches and all the rest of it.

So sure, leave Twitter and join Bluesky because of the hate. But at least be honest that some forms of hate seem to get a free pass on Twitter, while others are called out much more consistently. And as long ago as 2016 or earlier, people were concerned about Nazis on Twitter, so we shouldn’t act as if this is a new problem which only started under the current ownership.

I’ve got a lot of sympathy for this. I don’t want social media to split into two polarised platforms. I’ve also got a lot of sympathy for the concern that Bluesky might end up just censoring and shadow-banning a whole different set of content - including legitimate views on the right.

This isn’t an abstract concern. In the pre-Musk era, at least two sets of views were systematically suppressed on all the main social media sites, including:

• anti-lockdown views where, post-pandemic, the long-term impact on social inequality, children’s mental health and the economy, have borne out those who were raising these concerns;

• gender critical views, where serious concerns about children’s welfare (such as via the Cass Review), biological males in sports, prisons or refuges have now been borne out.

Whichever stance one personally holds, it’s absolutely clear that these are areas where reasonable people can and do take different sides, and they should be able to be discussed and debated openly, without censorship.

Broadly I think it's good for there to be a plurality of social media platforms with ownership from different political sources. No-one can be trusted not to censor, so plurality of ownership is the only solution. But that probably means plurality across different formats of platforms - Facebook vs Microposting (e.g. Twitter) vs longform (e.g. Substack) - etc. - not one format schisming into two non-communicating platforms. And Bluesky very much could still go to the bad as it scales.

So I won’t be deleting my Twitter account just yet.

But as to joining Bluesky, I think we need to recognise that the site is just a whole lot better. Those of us on the right should be in favour of the free market and competition, right? And while its hard for new products to break into markets that rely on network effects⁶, Bluesky is right now giving it a very good shot.

The best way to prevent Bluesky becoming a left-wing echo chamber is to go join it.

So how is it a better platform? Here are some of my favourite:

• No ability to pay for a blue-tick to have replies ‘boosted’.

• No suppression of posts with links to external platforms.

• No perverse incentives by monetising the most viral content.

• No adverts⁷

And, more positively:

• Very welcoming environment.

• User-created ‘Starter packs’ that give you a leg-up on followers - or let you follow lots of people you’re interested in.

• A proper Block function that stops you seeing them and them seeing you.

• Better moderation and deletion of bots

• The ability to ‘mute for everyone’ a specific comment on one of your own posts.

• The ability to ‘detach’ your post from a ‘quote-post’, to reduce the impact of pile-ons.

• The ability to create your own personal feeds.

• More civil culture.

Of course, it remains to be seen how many of the more cultural elements will remain as the place scales. But not having the monetised ‘blue tick’ incentives will help and, importantly, the tools are there to help people control what they see and who they interact with. No platform can eliminate rudeness, incivility or meanness - but they can give you the ability of making sure you don’t interact with people.

Will people abuse these? It depends on what you mean by abuse. Certainly there are ‘block lists’ being created, the counterpart to ‘starter packs’, which allow people to block a whole swathe of accounts at once. I’m on several already - along with a whole lot more starter packs - including the gloriously named ‘dog brains and piss drinkers.’⁸

But I don’t fundamentally have a problem with this. I almost certainly don’t want to interact with anyone who’d put me on such a blocklist as that (or use one), so I rather think they’ve saved both of us some trouble.

While I block readily and without qualms⁹, I’ll make my own decisions rather than use a block list - and most serious people you want to engage with won’t either. And ultimately, if some people do choose to use block lists - that’s their choice.

What matters is the overall platform, and that the platform itself isn’t censoring or shadowbanning views. I’ve not tried posting anything too controversial yet and, as it grows, it may be things change. We’ll see whether it stays a genuinely open platform, open to civil discussion of views across the political spectrum, in due course.

But right now, I'm totally in the mood for a better site.

So give it a try - even if you don’t delete your Twitter acount just yet. I’m confident you’ll get a good welcome.

1. This post is primarily aimed at people already on Twitter. If you don’t currently use Twitter then Bluesky is also unlikely to appeal.

2. OK, X, if you insist.

3. Like many on the British right, I’m also not a big fan of Trump, but I wouldn’t boycott a company because its owner supported him.

4. Especially as a good chunk of the Twitter ones may have been bots or spammers.

5. Though it is probably still harder to have something go truly viral there.

6. Social media companies do of course compete against each other all the time:

:

7. I suspect this may not last. But right now it’s great!

8. Maybe I should add this to my site biography.

9. A while ago I started blocking incivility and meanness (+ abuse) almost instantly and it has made my life on Twitter far more pleasant. 'You're dead wrong about that because X, Y, Z' is fine. 'Well, [name] that just shows how ignorant you are about economics', from an unknown, gets an instant block. Basically, you don’t owe anything to people you don’t know who make you unhappy.