Who is left with the exodus of X?

When Elon Musk managed to finalize the purchase of Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, he did so knowing that Twitter was going to die . Although his banner of struggle to the public was to fight for free speech in a world overrun by woke culture and bonism, what he ended up doing was transform the old public square into its platform for communication with the world .

In formal terms, Twitter is dead when it was renamed x the application with which Elon Musk intends to access all his digital services, such as Grok or even stream a video on Tic …something that was promised and will clearly never come true.

But in reality, the death of Twitter has started to take shape Musk’s management was taking actions that not only alienated its users but even more important for the survival of the application, advertisers .

The end of verification to make it a subscription service, the blocking of the service of several accounts of journalists who were investigating the South African billionaire, massive layoffs which turned into service interruptions, the dissolution of the Trust Council and security who took care of the South African billionaire. policies to moderate hate speech, sexual exploitation and dozens of other inappropriate content within the network and the departure of dozens of legacy sponsors complaining that their ads now appeared alongside apology messages for Nazism. These are just some of the events that have occurred in the Musk era over the past two years that have meant the demise of what was once Twitter .

x on the other hand, It’s a teenage experience a site that can sue advertisers accusing them of boycotting, where its owner can conduct polls to decide who should be the CEO, and where Musk can appear more frequently in recommended posts – even when the person is blocked – simply because that the person is blocked. . The owner wants to appear.

And yet, despite the fact that its number of active users has decreased by almost 30 million since 2022, the company has now lost 70% of the valuation for which Elon Musk bought it (according to estimates from the investment company Fidelity, which was part of the fundraising that the man behind Tesla had to carry out to acquire Twitter) and being at the worst moment of his reputation, there are two things that still keep X alive: without any doubt was an important element of the information mechanism which helped in the re-election of Donald Trump and it earned Musk a position in the next US government and that No other platform that matches it has yet appeared. .

The most radical sectors of the network have been announcing their exodus for some time and this week, a series of public figures and media like Tutor They are already keeping their word. And the question to ask is where will these people go? There are currently two sites vying to become the home of Twitter exiles: Topics And Blue sky . But which of the two can become the new Twitter? Or perhaps it will be time to let this stage of the web rest in peace and adopt its new codes?

They say that when the sale of Twitter was finalized in October 2022, already in November of the same year, The Instagram team has already started working on what would be its own microblogging app . Adam Mosseri the leader of Instagram, was tasked by Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the Meta group, with being able to maintain this market share.

Threads launched in July last year as its own application but strongly linked to the Instagram and Meta ecosystem. This gave them a big advantage over other similar apps, since they had a ready-made user base that they only needed to give a nudge to join Threads.

And the experience turned out: In just one day, 30 million users joined becoming the fastest growing app in history. And at the beginning of November, Mosseri revealed that the application had already reached 275 million users.

But Threads’ beginnings were not without challenges. For example, the service took 5 months to launch in Europe, due to questions raised by the European Union regarding the confidentiality of the service. For example, initially the Threads account was linked to the Instagram account in such a way that if you wanted to delete your Threads account, you had to do it with the Instagram account as well. Today, that doesn’t happen.

But it’s key to understanding not only the rapid rise in Threads’ popularity, but also the type of content that appears there and why, despite the numbers, it’s far from what Twitter wanted to be.

The strategy of combining Instagram with Threads is very useful for getting that first push. In fact, your Threads username and credentials are the same as Instagram. If you create an account you will immediately start following your contacts who also have threads and there is even cross content even if you don’t want it. While writing this note, I realized that many of the posts I had uploaded to Instagram were automatically arriving as posts on Threads, perhaps to maintain that “active user” base.

Or while you’re looking at photos on Instagram, it’s common for the app to also suggest content uploaded to Threads, which takes you to the app and voilà, it’s all done.

The problem I see with Threads is that although it technically has everything to work well: you can share photos, videos, respond to surveys, upload GIFs, 500 character texts, voice messages and integration with Feediverse, Your user base is not there to discuss, give opinions, generate discussions or inform, but only to gain likes and seek interactions to promote your content. .

In the first few months of Threads, influencers, content creators, marketing experts, and more discussed how to get the most out of it and get engagement. And this flow is still maintained. The threads may have many users, but they are full of similar farms, news that is not fake to misinform, but rather to generate comments and in general, a network that seems even emptier than browsing the Instagram Reels carousel.

Something that could be noticed on election night in the United States and that can be noticed in this Sunday’s gubernatorial elections, where only in X there is still the possibility of following a live event, while Threads is a bubble still far from everything that’s happening This is partly due to the lack of a “Trending Topics” section or the ability to organize content by topic. Supposedly this week Threads was going to upload its function to track personalized feeds with themes, to see if at least that generates the possibility of improving the quality of content, but when I tell you that Discussions are even emptier than Twitter please believe me. And that’s largely because he grew up in a community that learned that to stand out, he has to please what the algorithm asks of him, which is essentially how Instagram and the networks of this news work. era.

Beyond the aesthetic similarities with the old Twitter – featuring a light blue winged icon – The origin of Bluesky is closely linked to the old social network . Bluesky was born from an initiative within Twitter, led by its former CEO and founder Jack Dorsey, with which the idea of ​​being able to migrate the service, or at least to create a parallel system, but open source, to be capable of integrating messages from different providers, thus taking the idea of ​​a public square to the next level.

This is why, immediately after Musk’s decision became known, the option of Bluesky became one of the main initiators of the organization of exile. . The problem ? Bluesky is a small service and at the end of 2022 it was not even open to the public and had to be accessible via invitations.

It was only in February this year that the site was opened to all users, thus beginning its journey as an alternative to Twitter which simply wants to be what Twitter was in the beginning.

And oddly enough, in 2024, it had two events in which it appeared, in the public’s opinion, as the place to go when something bad happens in X. At the end of August, When A Brazilian judge ordered a halt to X operations for a test in which he had to provide information about certain users , Bluesky has become the refuge of the application . This is how it reached, at the time, its activity record, gaining 500,000 users in just two days.

A flow that diminished when X started working again, but which laid the foundations for what was to follow.

The new milestone happened a few weeks ago, When Elon Musk has been confirmed within the Trump administration and with that, the straw that broke the camel’s back for the progressive wing of the the largest user migration campaign to Bluesky ever allowing Bluesky to finally reach 20 million users this week.

Slow growth, compared to what happened with Threads, for example, but at least Yes, he wants to make Bluesky a new Twitter since the users who come there are Twitter users and, in fact, they crave the classic experience of the site.

Something they may be able to achieve given that there are already hundreds of news sites running on Bluesky, not least because it allows you to use your own domains as a username, which , when used well, is already a default verification system. The accounts of The Third And The Fourth in Bluesky, for example, they say Latercera.com And Lacuarta.com and thus differentiates itself from the rest of the users, whose name appears in the Bluesky domain.

But perhaps the biggest problem with the network right now is that It’s an experience too similar to Twitter but when it was not yet massive. Being in Bluesky is being on the Twitter of 2010 when the community, contacts and habit of connecting were just forming.

For now, Bluesky is a space dominated by nostalgia for better times, like the need to say no to Elon Musk, but when X continues, at least in its functionality, it is still a place where official sources, journalists and citizens show the reality. And while none of the alternatives are presented as something better, different, and addictive, as well-functioning Internet services always are, no matter how much you are against the way X’s network is run , it’s still the default place to track what is. happening live around the world, even if you have to navigate from time to time between messages of hatred, racism and the most fake news ever imagined.