Eight months into the Muskening, Twitter has finally started to break down in a meaningful way. Apparently, there is a need to move off Google’s cloud services, either for non-payment or god knows why, and and in the course of either not paying or trying to circumvent the need to pay, Twitter implemented a log-in-only approach and then broke the ability to load in such a way that it became necessary to rate-limit accounts in order to prevent DDOS-ing themselves.
Twitter is experiencing bankruptcy Hemingway-style: slowly, then quickly. The technical debt has accrued to the point where the failures are becoming more frequent, more obvious, and harder to remediate. More to the point, though, an alternative seems to be emerging: Bluesky, which began as a spitball project at Twitter trying to somehow crossbreed blockchain with distributed federation. It was supposed to be some kind of Web3 gimmick from the defective mind of Jack Dorsey. While he remains on the board (and has naturally gravitated to an even more crypto-moron product called nostr), Bluesky seems to be having a moment – signups have reached a point where they had to shut down new enrollments because of the traffic load.
This is even more significant because Bluesky is in beta and requires an invitation to get on. Which creates artificial scarcity, that thing that humans covet more than any other: let me in the exclusive place. And yet, for whatever reason, if you look at the people I most wanted to be on Twitter to follow because I like their content and don’t have another easy way to do it: they’re going toward Bluesky. Not Mastodon, not whatever else is on offer.
Which is not surprising. I stand by what I said about Mastodon not being a drop-in Twitter replacement, because it’s not meant to be. But it’s also suffering from the curse of desktop Linux: “this is free and open source and you can use it however you want NOT LIKE THAT.” Setting aside the fact that the biggest pre-Elon uptake of the Mastodon codebase was as a way for far-right freeze-peach Twitter alternatives like Gab or Truth to bootstrap themselves, the fact of the matter is: when you put something out in the wild for free, you can’t really govern what people will do with it. And as currently constituted, Mastodon is not a good replacement for Twitter, for the same reason Linux never took over the desktop and no one actually compiles their own Android for their device: Ed Earl Brown just wants to do the thing he wants to do, not build his own tools to do that thing, and fuck you Andy Rubin, nobody cares if it’s “open.”
The only way Mastodon beats out a dying Twitter is if there is no alternative, and if the anarchy of roll-your-own can be made easier than just hanging in there with a ham-faced yarpie bigot having your social media by the nuts. Bluesky is, on paper, what most of us wanted: Twitter from 2012 with someone else in charge. The old EDSBS commentariat is rapturing itself to the best of their ability. Random friends and people I only really know online are announcing their migration. For whatever reason, Bluesky might have cracked the secret sauce to be the next thing – because that’s where everyone’s going. That’s what they finally settled on as an acceptable alternative.
This doesn’t account for Threads, the product of the P92/Barcelona project over at Facebook, which will basically be “Twitter but using your existing Instagram ID”. At long last, you gotta make Facebook’s need to rip off everything else and cram in into Instagram work for you. It’s entirely possible that making a new Twitter off the back of something everyone already has an account for using will be the glide path, because there’s nothing new to sign up for: you have a user name and a friends list and an existing relationship, and the fact that Insta was the only safe social media for me in 2017 is not lost on me.
Two possibilities, two options that promise to have some substantial uptake (one already has), and the possibility of departing Twitter and keeping some of what I had, and the important bits at that? Let’s fly away into the breathtaking blue. Of which.