The Vibes Are Off: Did Elon Musk Push Academics Off Twitter?
cambridge.orgAnecdotally, the answer is a resounding yes. The two major academic communities I follow, mathematics and geology, have wholesale abandoned Twitter in the last several months for (mostly) Bluesky.
The net is bifurcating and, twitter vibes aside, I think we should all be a bit concerned with this “balkanization” of the internet. I don’t blame any one person, and it’s arguably better than everyone on one platform, still…
The Internet began on it's long path of Balkanization the moment people realized they can make money off of the Internet.
I agree we do not want one, or a few platforms, for social media.
What we need is a protocol for social media that is widely adopted, like http did for small websites. This is where I think ATProto shines (Bluesky). Meta is testing out ActivityPub with Threads, but that apparently has discoverability limitations that ATProto addresses. I also like how they make the four core components modular (App, data host, algo feed, moderation)
As an aside, the bifurcation is already well on the way between authoritarian govts and the free world
… I mean, for most of its history, the Internet was a bunch of small sites. The extreme centralisation of the last decade arguably shouldn’t be seen as a _good_ thing.
In any case, Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon/mainstream ActivityPub can all, with varying degrees of clunkiness, talk to each other.
I blame Elon Musk. He bought twitter and broke it.
I for the first time decided it's worth using after abandoning it very early on. I prefer to use it mostly read-only these days. So there's definitely opinion differences to be had about whether Elon broke twitter or "rescued it". One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter!
At least in my experience it wasn't all due to Musk. My part of the academic world was quite small, and seemed to be increasingly uncomfortable with the enshittification of Twitter before Musk's purchase. Observing that the new owner was a shitlord probably coordinated a departure earlier than otherwise would have happened, but I think the process was well underway already.
We mostly ended up on Mastodon, I think. Personally I'm quite grateful that it's no longer professionally necessary to have an extra social media account.
Who, aside from the extreme right wing, Elon Musk stans, and grifters, has not been pushed off twitter in the past year (and especially the past couple months)?
Admirable for someone to try to quantify this, though. The Brazil mass migration to Bluesky seems to have broken through another floor for twitter's userbase, we're likely atop another inflection point right now as basically everything Musk touches turns into MAGA hats.