Bluesky isn’t the ‘new Twitter,’ but its drawing millions of new users

By Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder What would you say at Twitter’s funeral? That’s the question my collaborators and I asked over 1,000 people on social media as part of a broader research project on Twitter migration. Responses ranged from the profane to the poetic, but one common theme was that despite its significant flaws, Twitter at its best was truly great … until it wasn’t. “The world is a better place for it having existed, and a better place now that it’s gone.” “It takes so little to destroy so much.” “I will miss it for what it could be in its best moments, but I will be happy that we can finally move on to healthier spaces.” For many, it was time to leave in the hopes of finding greener pastures. Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now branded as X, in October 2022, there have been reports of mass migration from the platform, and much ink was spilled – including some by me, a researcher who studies online communities – speculating where those users might land. The decentralized social network Mastodon attracted a lot of early attention, gaining a significant influx of users in the months following...