Yeah, we’ll see. I made my account a year ago but abandoned it. It’s super hard to maintain all these damn social media platforms, and BlueSky was not taking off because of the silly “invite only” gatekeeping. Switching cost is a major barrier. I think they’ve done a bit to address that with the “starter packs” option that allows people to mass follow or mass block curated lists.
This is the first time I’ve seen a push from so many well-known SWs with large followings to move over, so it feels a bit more significant.
I should have clarified that I don’t plan on leaving Twitter. I remain firm in my commitment to ride that bitch til the wheels fall off. They will have to remove me. But I am trying to migrate as much of my following over there as possible.
And as for whether it will be a SW haven: it won’t. None of these platforms are. If it’s good for us, it will be good until it isn’t. It’s just the way of things for us. The only way to survive as a SW is to make peace with the fact that you might wake up one day and find your primary source of income gone, either because the platform was seized or they changed TOU and/or you get deleted.
Regarding Mastodon, I just feel like it’s too nerdy for the general public. We had a Mastodon instance called Switter but we never really had clients embrace it like they do the mainstream platforms.
Ugh so much pressure! 😭 I have some very smart colleagues who have written pieces on these issues. I will try to compile a few in a post here soon.