OPINION

The X-odus to BlueSky: A dug in a blue sky

Wee Ginger Dug condemns Elon Musk’s X/Twitter for fostering hate speech and divisive content, highlighting BlueSky instead as a friendlier and more inclusive alternative for online interaction.

Wee Ginger Dug

Nov 18, 2024 — 4 min read

Credit: Dreamstime/Prykhodov

L ast week the Guardian newspaper announced that it would no longer be posting on Twitter. I refuse to call it X. You tweet on Twitter – what do you do on X? You excrete, of course, and since the platform was taken over by the world’s biggest attention seeker Elon Musk, Twitter has become a sea of excrement. There’s still the occasional worthwhile nugget there, but in order to find it, you have to scroll through screeds of excrement, racists, vaccine deniers and Trump supporters. It’s a deeply depressing and unpleasant experience.

The changes Musk made to the platform encouraged the far-right, by reinstating the accounts of those previously banned for racism and hate speech he signalled that he had an open door for every nasty to come crawling out from under its rock, and worse, by turning the blue tick verification into a paid subscription which gave those who had it greater prominence, the entire platform became an advert for fascism and porn.

As I wrote on this column a few months ago, I had already given up on Twitter. I had not looked at my mentions on that platform for almost two years, they were full of hateful comments, some of which are clearly defamatory and as such were like taking a cudgel to my mental health, which since the stroke I have had to take much better care of as I no longer have the strength and stamina or emotional resilience that I used to. I forced myself to stop looking after realising that all the bouts of depression I experienced were triggered by Twitter. It’s schoolyard bully stuff, devoid of intellect or wit, nastiness for the sake of nastiness. No one needs that in their life, I certainly don’t.

It got even worse after Trump won the recent American election, the far-right has become emboldened and empowered. The trickle away from Twitter which I had been a part of back in August became a flood. Musk’s role in the election of Trump alienated many who had gritted their teeth and stayed on Twitter but the decision of the Guardian to abandon Musk’s toy was the signal for many of a vaguely left-wing and liberal persuasion to do the same. There has been a movement en masse to the alternative platform BlueSky.

BlueSky is not perfect, no social media platform is, but it does have active moderation and allows users greater control over what appears in their feeds. I opened an account there in August when I stopped posting on Twitter, mainly in order to reserve my @weegingerdug username, but I only decided to start using it this week.

So far, it’s a vastly better experience, like Twitter but without the fascism, intolerance and the tiresome pursuit of gotchas, people there seem to be friendlier and far more inclined to civil exchanges. It’s definitely a much better place for women and LGBT people, and there is a rapidly growing community of Scottish independence supporters. BlueSky’s user base has doubled in the past 90 days, to almost 19 million users, with one million new users in the UK in the past week alone.

Alternatives to Twitter have come and gone before, I tried Mastodon but found it confusing and the interface decidedly non-user friendly. Threads seemed to be a potential home for Twitter refugees, although I suppose they should now be called ex-Xers, but Meta which owns it changed its algorithm to suppress political content, and it’s a moot point whether giving your attention and clicks to be monetised by Mark Zuckerberg is really that much better than giving them to be monetised by Elon Musk.

I am not judging those who don’t want to leave and surrender Twitter completely to the far-right; that’s a valid choice, but speaking personally, I no longer have the emotional or psychological resources to deal with the unpleasantness that is so prevalent there.

I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at @weegingerdug.bsky.social. Follow me there, and I will generally follow back. I follow back everyone who follows me who has filled in their bio description and who doesn’t appear to be a bigot, an anti-vaxxer, a Trump or Putin or genocide apologist, a racist, or a Unionist frother. People are entitled to their views and to their opinions, I just don’t necessarily want to see it in my timeline. Twitter didn’t give me the option to filter that stuff out, BlueSky does. Hopefully, I will see you there.