A few months after I started using Bluesky, I wrote: “…the only reason I’m still on Twitter is that Bluesky simply isn’t big enough yet to provide all the content I need to keep this blog going.” But it was difficult to figure out exactly how I’d know when the time had come, because it’s actually rather difficult to compare the sites. Because Twitter uses algorithms to hide a lot of my posts, artificially boost the reach of garbage and advertisements, and freeze the follower counts of people it wants to silence, there’s no real apples-to-apples comparison with Bluesky, which does none of those things. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, my follower count there had been frozen at roughly 18,500 for several years; since then it has slowly dwindled to about 16,500 as people abandon the declining platform. But even when my follower count at Bluesky was a small fraction of that, I routinely noticed that most posts on Bluesky would get double or triple-digit levels of engagement while the exact same post on Twitter got single-digit levels. And that’s not the only indicator; in November of 2024 Twitter changed some kind of code so it was no longer possible to embed tweets on my website, so at that time my monthly selection switched entirely over to Bluesky.
About two years ago I decided that when my Bluesky follower count reached half of my Twitter follower count, it would probably be time to leave Twitter for good. As of this writing my count is 7900, and by the time you read this it will likely have hit 8000; judging by past performance I’m likely to hit my trigger-point of 8200 by the beginning of summer. My posts there routinely get more reach than they’ve had on Twitter in the past decade, and the average quality of the responses is dramatically higher; furthermore, most of the people I used to be interested in reading on Twitter have now moved to Bluesky, so I no longer need to sift through Twitter for content. Accordingly, once I hit 8200 I’ll be largely stepping away from Twitter. I plan to mute everyone there who is also on Bluesky because like me, most of those folks cross-post everything, and while I will still check my account so as to reply to messages, I’ll no longer make original posts there. All good things must come to an end, and Twitter has been dying for years now. But at least we have a decent replacement.
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