It wasn’t all too long ago when, frankly, my social network habits were pretty easy to manage. Did I spend too much time scrolling through nonsense in my Twitter feed and saving recipe videos on Instagram for meals I’ll never cook? Yeah, probably, but at least it was segmented into those two applications. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in anymore. In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, my social network bubble — and, most likely, yours — has been split into several groups, and I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.
People have been threatening to leave Twitter since well before Elon renamed the app, but over the past month or so, the exodus has really kicked off in style. Bluesky has been reporting record activity, Threads continues to pull in an impressive amount of daily active users, and Mastodon, well, continues to carry on as usual. I’ve watched as both my following and follower count on Twitter have dropped, as accounts that once filled up my feeds finally called it quits on the platform.
Not that they’re done posting, of course. Practically every terminally online poster that once called Twitter home has moved somewhere. The vast majority of the tech accounts I once followed are over on Threads now. After months of dragging my feet, I finally signed up for Threads earlier this year, but without the other online communities I enjoy following, like film and sports, it feels oddly vacant. And that’s to say nothing of the engagement bait that fills up my feed on a regular basis.
Then there’s Bluesky. Plenty of my favorite ex-Twitter posters have jumped over to that platform, and I, too, have tried spending some time on the site. There are things I like — how familiar it feels, the default timeline experience lacking any algorithmically suggested posts — but quieter voices tend to get drowned out by people constantly reposting (reskeeting? No.) other people’s thoughts. Still, when Kendrick Lamar dropped his surprise sixth LP on Friday, it was Bluesky, not Twitter, where I saw the most interesting discussions.
I have to be honest — Mastodon hasn’t won me over. By splitting up communities, it’s simply never going to be a place I want to visit, since I have such a wide variety of accounts I’m looking to follow. I get the appeal, and as an open-source platform, I hope it thrives, but it’s not a place I frequent just yet.
And frankly, neither are Bluesky or Threads. The real outcome of a mass exodus away from Twitter isn’t a whole new slate of apps to check daily, it’s me spending less time on social media. That’s healthy, sure, but it does ruin something that, for a while, was a pretty magical experience. I have Twitter, as a platform, to thank for career opportunities and lifelong friends, but that space now feels truly dead and gone. Sure, Twitter — as X — is still around, but it just doesn’t feel the same.
So, what about you? Have you made the move to a new Twitter-like social network? Are you riding and dying with Elon Musk’s X? Or are you, like me, trying to use this as an opportunity to reduce your time spent online? While this weekend’s poll can only leave space for the place you’ve moved to online, I’d love to see some further discussions on this in the comments below.
