The Don and The Threads and The Sky
Twitter used to be the online place to be. A place where the great and the good mixed with the common folk. A place to get the news and find people with common interests.
When the world's thinnest skinned billionaire bought it for forty four billion dollars in October 2022, it rapidly started going downhill. He sacked most of the staff, tried to monetise it and reinstated accounts of previously banned users like Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson. It turned into a terrible right wing cesspit full of racists and Nazis.
Pretty soon after it was announced that Twitter was being sold, other Twitter-alike apps started appearing. Mastodon had already been around a while, made and populated by people who had been driven off Twitter by those intolerant of their existence. Structured differently to Twitter - a connected network of servers rather than one centralised nazi blob - it seemed difficult for less tech minded people to sign up to. Its lack of algorithm driven content also made it more egalitarian - big stars' posts carried the same weight as a checkout operator's. Many people moved over, then deserted it when it didn't give them the exact same Twitter experience.
Facebook created their own Twitter-alike which they called Threads (after the 1980s Nuclear Holocaust film of the same name), which required people to sign up to Instagram.
The other main Twitter clone is Bluesky; a research project started in 2019 by the creator of Twitter. Theoretically it runs like Mastodon on decentralised servers, but - like Twitter - offers algorithmic feeds.
Until the 2024 US Election, Twitter had been steadily leaking users, but the ramping up of right wing rhetoric along with the return of previously banned accounts during the election cycle made the scales fall from a lot of Twitter users' eyes. Up until that point it was easy for them to pretend that things were still okay, that the Nazis in their replies were just one offs. But the election result and the arse licking of Twitter's owner to the election winner were suddenly too much for those that hadn't already left the platform.
Bluesky account sign ups have increased massively since the election, people calling themselves "Twitter refugees" publish posts proclaiming "I am here now" and commenting how much nicer it is compared to that other place they were still happily posting on up until the day after Bonfire Night.
Threads is not only populated by people with Instagram accounts, but also people with Bluesky accounts who are hedging their bets on which platform the cool kids are going to be on. It's kind of like getting to a party too early; a group of strangers in a huge empty room, waiting for their friends to rock up and things to kick into life.
Mastodon still plods away, angrily scolding people for not adding Alt Text To Images and not putting Content Warnings on anything remotely upsetting. The people there, sharing their niche interests, are happy to be there; but it's "too niche" for the Bluesky kids who see them as "Whiny Nerds."
At the moment, Bluesky is winning the popularity contest because it successfully recreates that Twitter buzz of allowing normal plebs to interact with famous, semi-famous, internet famous and Bluesky famous people. It has the feeling of early Twitter, before every company had an account there and before BBC News started using it as a source for vox pops.
The problem will come when the bots and the hostile governments with their disinformation and the newspapers and the TV stations and the businesses and the political commentators and your Weird Uncle With Questionable Views Who Can Just About Operate A Smartphone descend on it. Then, no matter how resilient the blocking and muting functions are, Bluesky will just become Twitter 2.0.