Twitter is dead. Long live BlueSky.

The exodus is real.

Photo by EMRE YILMAZ on Unsplash

We need to be honest with ourselves . This is all partly to make us feel better. 

There are impeccable practical reasons for leaving Twitter and joining BlueSky. There are sound moral, tactical and political reasons for it. But also, truthfully, it’s giving us a sense of agency. Most of us didn’t even have a vote at the US election, we just had to live with the consequences. At least here we have some kind of voice. In a world we can't control, which feels like it's teetering on the edge of the abyss, we can at least control this. And now, finally, we are.

Under Elon Musk, Twitter has become borderline unusable for normal people. I tend to check it for two things: people who make me laugh and people who teach me about things. Neither of those elements are really possible now. Whichever post you look at, you have to scroll past two dozen blue tick Nazis shouting about race hygiene before you get to the normal contributors. That's not a usable model. No-one's got the time for that shit. No-one's got the emotional space for it. It's just not a nice place to be. It's not a pleasant way to spend your time.

The entire notion of paying for prominence, which Musk unleashed with his blue tick policy, is obviously antithetical to the experience of being on a social media site. For a start, it's cheating. You should earn your prominence. But also, it's an insult to the user. It means the content you see is based not on how interesting, funny or informative it is, but on how much someone is willing to pay to force it on you. It replaces editorial with advertising.

That would be bad enough on its own terms. But when it's Nazis who are most willing to pay, it becomes untenable. 

I will still post links to my stuff on Twitter, but my day-to-day social media activity is now on Blue Sky. I'm not opening Twitter to check it. I've hidden the app on my phone and closed the tweetdeck tab on my laptop. When I want to see what's going on, I'm scrolling BlueSky. When I have a random thought, I write it on BlueSky. 

Just because something is making us feel better doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean it is risk free.

I spent years building a following on Twitter. And for what it's worth, I'm actually kinda proud of it. I accept that the vast majority of this accomplishment was based on calling people cunts, but I nevertheless enjoyed that, a few others seemed to as well, and it was reassuring to know that the things I felt were reciprocated by many of the people around me. I got to feel human connection by calling people cunts. I really was having my cake and eating it.

Having a decent Twitter following opened doors - big important career doors. It meant my articles received solid traffic so editors wanted me to write for them. It meant producers on podcasts saw my stuff and approached me. It meant publishers met with me to discuss book projects. To be clear: it's not just that they discovered my stuff on Twitter. It's that this kind of reach reassured them that I could promote it too. Leaving that behind is professionally dangerous. You don’t do it lightly.

More importantly, there is a political danger. There is a real risk for progressives, that we need to be cognisant of. Some people will not like this but it needs saying. We need to keep our feet in Twitter while pushing people away from it. Stop tweeting, sure. Stop scrolling. But keep a presence. If we fail to pull the bulk of mainstream political operators away from it, we have a major problem. We will have handed the main forum of political discussion to the far-right. 

That is a huge vulnerability. Twitter is where current affairs producers decide on what they will discuss on an afternoon radio programme, that people who have never heard of BlueSky will listen to in their car. It's where they often find the talking heads who have the debate on air. It's where journalists get a sense of the day's news, which then makes it into newspaper copy, which is then picked up by the broadcasters to inform the News at Ten. Twitter is a furnace. And out of the molten sludge at its base, our entire current affairs narrative is forged, cooling out and hardening at more traditional news outlets. 

Social media deals in purity, so it is possible that people will split harshly down the lines of insisting people must leave Twitter completely to show their resolve. That is not helpful. You can pursue an ideal outcome while maximising a suboptimal outcome. You can fight for the thing you most want, while simultaneously preparing for the thing you do not want. We can therefore fight to get everyone to migrate to BlueSky, while keeping a foot in the door at Twitter in case we fail.

Twitter gave me a lot. Removing the app from my homescreen felt a bit like finally deleting the number of an ex.

I don't really work well in a newsroom. Maybe it would be different now, with different cultural vibes - I dunno - but when I started out I didn't quite fit the mould. I didn't have the requisite distance from the material. I was genuinely emotionally engaged in it, I was cross and I had a loud slightly shrieky laugh. None of it really worked in that environment. When I did make friends in journalism I noticed that they were almost always women. The men in particular didn’t like me, which was a problem because it was mostly run by men.

It would have taken me a very long time to secure work as a columnist through that system, I think. It might not have happened at all. Imagine the loss to the world of ideas. But honestly my manner and my disposition weren't the right fit. I needed Twitter to go over the heads of people in the industry directly to an audience, the proof of which allowed me to secure work in the industry.

I was taught quite early on to have an impression of who you are writing for each time you take on a project. In Twitter's case, I was writing for my friends in the pub. That is the Twitter forum. That's how I thought of it. You are with your friends, you want to chat, to properly fucking chat, to make them laugh, to say whatever the hell happens to come up in your mind, which may or may not be political, and to swear, and be imaginative in how you swear, and to express your deep boiling indignation at the state of the people who govern us. 

Having that daily form of writing experience really helped me. It did the thing you are always looking for as a writer - to reduce the distance between the mind and the hand. To get the words coming out on the page - or screen or whatever - as close as dammit to the voice that you use when you are speaking. To finesse daily until you can write almost exactly as you speak. This really is the key to good writing. Twitter trained me in it even when I didn't realise I was doing it.

It also provided a distant but meaningful form of human friendship and solidarity.

We like to slag off echo chambers. They're terribly unfashionable nowadays. But let's be clear: echo chambers have always existed. Humans have always gathered around those who think like them. "We began to recognise ourselves," Baron de Gauville wrote during the French Revolution. "Those who were attached to their religion and to the king had confined themselves to the right of the president, in order to avoid the cries, the remarks, and the indecency that was happening in the opposing parties." That's an echo chamber right there, 300 years old, forming naturally on the basis of social dynamics. Newspapers in this country have always been an echo chamber, read by people who want to read other people who think largely like themselves, broadcasting their own prejudices back at them in a closed system of fake validation. You've no more chance of stopping people forming echo chambers than you do of stopping them taking drugs. The question is: how do we try and shape them to reduce bad outcomes and maximise good ones?

During Brexit I found that Twitter’s echo chambers helped with political discussion. When you agreed on the elemental issue - is Brexit good or bad - you could open up more detailed and meaningful discussion, and disagreements, about others matters. But also, that echo chamber offered emotional support during long brutal years, when it sometimes felt like you were going completely insane and people were doing the most astonishingly bovine things. It reminded you that there were other people out there who felt the same way. And thank god for that. It would have been intolerable without it.

Of course, there was another side to all this. Every so often, this lovely pub you thought you were in with a bunch of mates disappeared. You said something a bit off, or made a statement without including every possible caveat, or stated something simplistically, or were a bit too aggressive, and then you blinked your eyes and you weren't in a pub anymore. It was an abattoir. A slaughterhouse for your reputation. And for a day or two you would lose control of the thing altogether. At its worst - this happened to me a few times - it would cross the Atlantic. So just as things were dying down in the UK, the Americans would wake up and another bigger wave would engulf you. Sometimes this happened on the right. Mostly it happened on the left. It really was quite an insane place to be.

I wonder how many right-wing culture warriors, on any number of issues, were forged in those moments of group vilification. It doesn't excuse them, but it does help explain them and offers an indication of how we can prevent more of them in future. In certain cases you could almost watch it turn into a kind of origin story in their internal narrative - the proof of how society tried to silence them and their great bravery in fighting back, which they would recount at length on stage at literary festivals and on radio talk shows. 

We developed a system that allowed us to look saintly by virtue of our moral indignation at others. And yet it worked persistently to worsen their moral behaviour and degrade our own. A world of self-defined saints, all of us insisting we are totally pure but that we are plagued all around us by the utterly depraved.

When people fought, and they often fought, they did it in the worst possible way. Probably the worst thing about Twitter was the numbers. The likes and the retweets. They acted as victory markers. You would watch two reasonable people have a minor disagreement and work themselves into a state of biblical fury. Why? Because it was so public. And because of those goddamned numbers - each little click on a heart symbol ironically operating as a victory token to decide who came out on top. And all of this restricted to very short messages of a few dozen characters which did not permit of nuance or caveat. 

It was all ruinous to the standards of debate and the type of attitude you need for a good discussion. Worst of all, this combined with broadcasting in really pernicious ways. TV anyway has a tendency towards simplistic binary thinking - right vs left with a referee in the middle. This was a problem even in the 80s when it involved trade union leaders versus Conservative ministers - 'Quick! The free market! Good or bad?' - but it deteriorated into the most asinine stupidity once the social media dynamic was added to it. Twitter fuelled binary opposition in the crudest terms on the thorniest issues - cultural appropriation, empire, Brexit, pronouns - and then beamed it out into the broader media environment. Utter fucking poison.

All of these thoughts are in the past now. Twitter is dying. That which is good about it will fade just like that which is bad. Actually that’s not true, the good stuff will fade much faster and is in fact already mostly gone, but you get my point. It’s done. It’s toast. A million people a day are leaving and going to BlueSky. 

It's scary, but also exciting. It feels a bit like the discovery of the Digital New World. There's a chance now to start afresh. To think about the things that worked on Twitter and the things that didn't and try to address them. Remembering that place isn’t just nostalgia. It is a guide to what we do next.

BlueSky has a function that allows people to unlink themselves from a quote-tweet. It's such a small thing. Just a clever little bit of functionality. But if you've ever been at the bottom of a pile-on, you'll know instantly how helpful it might be - just removing yourself from their little hate fest. It's the product of people who are thinking responsibly about how to make a place functional, rather than simply driving engagement through anger. It reflects a serious-mindedness that has been completely absent from social media companies recently and Twitter in particular.

Will it fix everything? Not even slightly. Are we just making ourselves feel better by focusing on one small area that we can control? Absolutely.

But you know what? Who cares. This much we can indeed control. This much we can improve. We can, at the very least, start here.

You can follow me on BlueSky here. Come say hello.