Everyone threatened to leave X because of the Nazis. Why didn’t they?
Bluesky is growing, but people aren’t ready to leave the site formerly known as Twitter
Old habits die hard — and no one wants to switch to a new platform that’s just like something they already use. Graphic by Mira Fox/Canva
By Mira Fox January 6, 2025
Twitter was always a dumpster fire. Over the years, the social media site has become known as a home for gossip, rampant judging, cancellations and drama writ large. Its users, somewhat affectionately, referred to it as “this hellsite” and regularly promised to log off for their own sanity. Of course, they didn’t actually. The drama that made Twitter so hellish was also what made it fun.
But when Elon Musk took over in 2022 and rechristened the site X, threats to leave it became more serious. Musk reinstalled the accounts of well-known white supremacists and dangerous conspiracy theorists such as Nick Fuentes, who accuses Jews of trying to eradicate white people almost daily. (Fuentes, thanks to his premium subscription, is regularly promoted into my feed.)
The Anti-Defamation League released a statement in September 2023 castigating Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic posts and advising advertisers to boycott X. Many listened, pulling their ad dollars from the platform; millions of users left as well. (In response, Musk threatened to sue the ADL — though the Jewish organization continued to pay for ads for a short period, and still has a paid premium account.)
Numerous other platforms sprang up to absorb the displaced user base. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, launched Threads, which reached 30 million users in its first 24 hours. There were excited conversations about joining smaller, independent platforms like Mastodon and Post. People began to vie for invitations to Bluesky, a platform launched by Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey that was still in beta development at the time.
Musk took over more than two years ago, though, and nothing has become the new Twitter. Only two platforms — Threads and Bluesky — have even remained in the conversation. Bluesky was recently buoyed by a post-election rush of users protesting Musk’s close ties with Trump by defecting from his site. Threads has stayed alive in part through crossposting with Instagram, also owned by Meta.
Still, by late 2024, X’s user base in the U.S. was more than 20% lower than when Musk took over. (X asserted that “daily active user minutes” are up.) But while many users did, finally, follow through on their threats to cease using the platform, many others stayed. Still others who announced their departure breathlessly made accounts on Bluesky and Threads but continued to post on X.
Given that nearly everyone seems to agree that the platform is worse than it was before Musk took it over — more plagued by hate speech and conspiracy theories, more polluted by ads and bots that clutter everyone’s feeds — why have most people continued to use it?
The answer may be somewhat simple: X might be worse than Twitter, but nothing else is any good either.
Threads’ algorithm, in an attempt to prevent the sort of hate speech and controversy that troubles most platforms from ruining its own, has instead ruined it by preventing anything actually interesting from appearing in anyone’s feed. There’s no news or real-time chatter about cultural events or the latest gossip. My Threads feed is composed of largely milquetoast engagement bait: long mildly annoying or mildly heartwarming anecdotes about someone’s mailman or spouse or a person in the line at the grocery store. There’s usually a neat moral to tie up the story. It’s didactic and, worse, it’s boring.
Bluesky is a lot better — perhaps due, in large part, to that post-election influx of millions of users, which gave it some critical mass. Journalists are using it to share their work, people at least appear to be engaging in real time, and conversations are happening. Helpfully, it features starter packs of users so you can find the people you want to follow, and feeds catered to specific interests. I have yet to see conspiracy theories flourish there, though that’s due in part to the platform’s strong leftward slant — it definitely feels like an echo chamber, and many of the posts are devoted to making fun of Elon Musk. Even when people leave X, they can’t escape it.
The platform also doesn’t quite have the user base necessary to sustain the kind of vitality that made Twitter so hard to look away from. Jwitter, for example — as the group of Jewish Twitter users is called — was a vibrant place of diverse conversations about politics, history and Talmudic takes. There were Jewish influencers. (There still are.) There was internal discourse. JewSky is just a few Jews who happen to use Bluesky.
“It was hard for me to get used to a new app and my account was not growing like X so I kind of gave up on it,” Avital Levene said of Bluesky; we chatted via DM on X, where she has a successful account with the handle @TheJewishMemeQueen. “I’m not going to join a new app that’s exactly like another app I already have.”
Besides, she said of concerns about hate speech, “I think every platform has hate speech.”
Of course, there are more factors: The interface is on Bluesky is clunkier. Some people like Elon Musk! Not everyone minds a little hate speech in the name of less moderation. But the basic issue is that, even with its issues, X is still more fun, even if I might feel kind of guilty using it. However cluttered by bots and hate speech, an hour on X still produced posts that were unhinged, funny or insightful enough that I immediately wanted to share them. Bluesky did not.
Maybe, in time, Bluesky will develop enough of a voice and culture that it will begin to have real gravity and attraction of its own, and become more than a home for refugees from X. It even already had its first big stupid discourse-generating drama, all about who was following who.
If not, though, that might not be the worst thing; with X increasingly cluttered by ads and bots, I find myself spending less time on it. I’m not scrolling Bluesky for hours either. With all that free time, maybe I’ll read a book.
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