Bluesky

This week we talk about Mastodon, Threads, and twttr.

We also discuss social platform clones, user exoduses, and communication fractures.

Recommended Book: Invisible Rulers by Renée DiResta

Transcript

In 2006, a prototype of a software project called twttr, t-w-t-t-r, was developed by Jack Dorsey and Florian Weber, that name used because the full twitter.com domain, the word with all its vowels, was already owned and in use, and because the vowel-less version of the word only had five letters, which aligned with SMS short codes for the US, which were basically shorthand versions of telephone numbers that were used in lieu of such numbers by mobile network operators at the time.

Going without vowels was also super trendy in Silicon Valley back then, due to the flourishing of online success stories like Flickr.

Twitter, in that early incarnation, was meant to be a one-to-many SMS service, which means sending text messages from one phone to multiple phones, rather than one to one, which was the default.

This early prototype was used internally at Odeo, which was an early-2000s web-based media directory, founded by some of the same people who eventually founded Twitter as a company, and random fun fact, Kevin Systrom who eventually cofounded Instagram, was an intern at Odeo one summer, back in 2005, before the company was sold in 2007.

Twitter was spun out as its own company the same year Odeo was sold, and by 2009 it had become the hot new thing in the burgeoning world of the web—folks were sending tens of thousands of tweets, messages that were shared one-to-many, though online, on the web, instead of via SMS, by the end of 2007, and that was up to 50 million a day by early 2010.

The whole concept of Twitter, then, from its name, which was initially predicated on SMS short codes, to its famous 140-character limit, was based on earlier technology, that of text messages, and that sort of limitation—which has in the years since been messed with a bit, the company slowly adding more capabilities, including the sharing of images and videos and other media types—but those limitations have in part helped define this platform from its peers, as while Facebook expanded and expanded and expanded to gobble up all of its general-purpose social networking competitors, Instagram dominated the photo-posting space, and YouTube has locked down the long-form video world for more than a decade, twitter held its own as a less-sprawling, less successful by most metrics, but arguably more influential network because it was a place that was optimized for concision and up-to-the-minute conversation, as opposed to every other possible thing it could be.

This meant that while it didn’t have the same billion-plus user base, and it didn’t have the ever-growing ad-revenue that Meta’s platforms could claim, it was almost always the more culturally relevant network, its users sharing more up-to-date information, its communities generating more memes, which were then spread to other networks days or weeks later, and it became a hotbed of debate and exclusive information from journalists, politicians, and business owners.

A lot changed when Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk bought the network in October of 2022, changing the name to X in mid-2023, and pivoting the company dramatically in basically every way: removing a lot of those earlier limitations, cutting the number of employees by something like 80%, and losing a lot of advertisers because of his many ideological statements and political stances—including his backing of former president and now president-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

What I’d like to talk about today are the twitter clones that have popped up in recent years, and one in particular that, despite its still-small size and arguable underdog status, is being heralded as the possible successor of Twitter—in that original, influential and scrappy sense—and what makes this network, Bluesky, different from other would-be successors in this space.

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The leadership at X, including owner Musk, recently promoted a new feature on the app that refocuses attention away from buttons like likes and shares in favor of views—a metric of engagement that some analysts have claimed is meant to conceal the fact that the network is seeing a lot less actual, human engagement, and because it feeds people posts it wants them to see, this change allows them to artificially inflate the seeming activity on these posts for advertising purposes: they can say, hey look how much attention these posts are getting, please buy some ads, and that allows them to charge a higher price than if they were using those more conventional engagement metrics, which are apparently collapsing.

As a company, X has been hemorrhaging money since Musk took over, its ad revenue, which makes up the majority of its income, dropping by nearly half from 2022 to 2023, and it lost another 24% from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024.

One estimate released in November of 2024 suggests that X may have missed out on nearly $6 billion in lost ad revenue since Musk took over in 2022, mostly because of all the decisions he’s made—including basically going to war with many of the company’s top advertisers, publicly criticizing and threatening them for not paying more and buying more ads—but also his many foot-in-mouth statements and, at times, support of extremist causes and characters.

He’s attempted to bring some of those advertisers back, with mixed success, as the ones that have returned after boycotts have usually invested far less than in the past, and most of the ad-buyers that have filled the gaps are paying a lot less per ad unit than before, and are generally of a lower quality: a lot of cheaply products from low-grade Chinese factories, scams of various sorts, and/or products sold by companies that are politically conservative culture-warriors, aimed at the network’s increasingly right-leaning and far-right audience; a bit like what we’ve seen on Fox News over the past decade or so, following waves of sexual assault and other scandals on that network, which led to similar advertiser exoduses.

It’s also been estimated that the network lost a substantial portion of its total user-base following Musk’s takeover, including something like a third of all users in the UK and around a fifth in the United States, all just in 2024, up till the month of September.

That loss of revenue and users was enough to cause Fidelity, which owns a multi-million-dollar stake in X, to write down the value of its investment by more than 75%; in July of 2024, it estimated the company, which was purchased for about $44 billion by Musk was only worth about $9.4 billion; a substantial loss for them and their investment, but also for all other shareholders.

All of which leads up to what happened in the wake of the US’s most recent presidential election, during which Musk shelled out more than $100 million to support Trump’s campaign, while also pulling out all the stops to promote the former president on X—something that many users weren’t too keen on, as the owners of other social networks have been criticized and threatened in the past for showing any hint of political bias in their business decisions or personal life, and this was incredibly overt.

This heavy-handed biasing of the network toward Trump, and that very public support of the candidate by X’s owner, sparked a new exodus from the platform, some people simply quitting social media entirely, at least for a while, but others looking for something of the same, and thus checking out the twitter-clones that have popped up over the past handful of years; the majority of which only actually gained real momentum in the wake of Musk’s takeover and rebranding of the network a few years ago.

One of those twitter-alternatives, Mastodon, attracted a lot of early attention because of what it offered that twitter, and other mainstream social networks, did not: an open source platform based on the ActivityPub protocol, which means it can connected to other ActivityPub-capable social networks.

So in theory at least, you can have a profile on a Mastodon instance—which a self-hosted Mastodon network, a social platform island of sorts that is connected to other such islands, the totality of the social network made up of a huge number of such instances, all interconnected in various ways, and each offering different rules and focuses—you can have that profile on that island function on other networks beyond Mastodon, as well.

And that’s interesting because it means your work, your posts and conversations, are all more portable, allowing you to move to different networks if you choose, without losing your history and connections and credibility, because it’s all compatible with other networks.

So it’s almost like having a Facebook profile that you can also use on Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, if all those networks played well together and shared information and post types between each other; that’s the promise of a protocol like ActivityPub and a network like Mastodon.

Mastodon was made public in 2016 as a nonprofit, has basically the same feature-set as pre-Musk twitter, and while it had already gained a steady stream of users from previous upsets at networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, among other more mainstream networks, it attained a huge number of new users in 2022 on the news that Musk would be taking over Twitter, hitting around 2.5 million monthly active users by the end of that year.

That number has since dropped to just under a million as of September 2024, suggesting that the initial wave of enthusiasm has cr