Like many people I’ve been humming and haaing about moving from Twitter/X to Bluesky. This week it finally seemed to be the right time. So I secured my name, thinking that I’d set the account up properly at a later date. But the interface was so familiar, so similar to Twitter, that I jumped right in. I haven’t closed my Twitter account, but I have pinned up a message about having gone to the other place.
A while ago I tried opening a Mastodon account but I couldn’t get used to it and struggled to find any conversations there. Part of the difficulty of moving is that it’s a huge hassle, not to mention the fear of losing all your followers and followees. Plus Lists – I have always found Twitter’s List facility really useful. Although many of my lists are surely in need of a spring clean, nevertheless I’d be pained to lose them all. Then there are followers and following of course – though I suspect a big chunk of them are no longer relevant. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007 and during my really active years I was following tech types, social experts, futurists, PRs and anyone internet biz-related, clients, competitors etc. These days I have different interests and different reasons for spending time on social media. The serendipity of social networks has always delighted me, which is one reason I left Facebook about 5 years ago. Facebook just felt like a walled community/echo chamber with no prospect of encountering randomly interesting people or opinions. I remember someone saying years ago that Facebook is where you hang out with the people you went to school with; Twitter is where you meet the people you wished you’d gone to school with. Of course, Twitter has since then been wrecked. I’d given up on ever reliving the joyous early days of Twitter. So imagine my excitement at finding another place where I could start again.
But where to start? My first lifesaver was a nifty Chrome extension called Sky Follower Bridge. When you run it, it will show you which of your Twitter followers, followees or list members are on Bluesky, and an easy way to to follow them. This meant that within a few hours I was following a hundred or so people who otherwise would have taken me ages to find. Then the messages started – people who I thought I’d lost on Twitter, or in real life, old friends welcoming me… it was wonderful. I had become so dissatisfied/disenfranchised from Twitter, and now here was proof that the lovely universe of likeminds and generally interesting people were still out there, no longer blanked out by all the trash and adverts.
I posted a bit about what I was doing, including my updating the submissions spreadsheet. Boom! That got people’s attention. And now I’m looking forward to spending a small amount of time each day nurturing my presence there. Finding new people to follow, reading, replying and reposting. So far, it feels like fun. Fingers crossed the Bluesky momentum carries on building, and may it forever resist the combined devilry of force-fed ads, bots, trolls, paywalls and malicious takeovers. Come on in, the water’s lovely.
Thanks for this post Robin. I may very well join you soon. I’m mostly on Instagram, which I’m still enjoying, but have been thinking about quitting Twitter. I seem to need to mull these things over for a while, but your experience is reassuring.