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It’s been two years since Elon Musk acquired the former Twitter, now X. That led to a steady Xodus (sorry!) of hundreds of thousands or millions of formerly loyal users to new platforms like Mastodon and, the following summer, Facebook’s Threads.
Since last week’s shocking re-election of Donald Trump, another wave of X users has left for bluer pastures, this time for Bluesky, founded in part by former X co-creator Jack Dorsey, and some venture capitalists.
There is also a surge of Xpatriates moving to the decentralized Mastodon service. Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko posted Friday on Mastodon that it has benefited from the Xodus as well. Official “app downloads are up 47% on IOS and 17% on Android.” Sign-ups are up roughly 27% compared to the previous month, with 90,000 new accounts.
Thus far, though, Bluesky has drawn more media attention this week. Bluesky has been around since 2021 but had a slow start, beginning with an “invitation-only” approach to big names or those with massive followings. It is now wide open and free to all comers.
But the floodgates have really opened since last week’s election and Musk’s infiltration of the new Trump 2.0 administration. A million new users flocked to Bluesky in the last week alone, bringing the total user base to 15 million, according to Time. I am one of them, joining on Remembrance Day.
Truth to tell, (certainly not Truth Social!) I had NOT planned to join Bluesky, as I am already on Mastodon, Threads and — oh yeah — Linked In and Facebook. Since I have not yet left X, I felt 5 or 6 social media platforms was probably two or three too many. Even so, some contacts at X the past week suggested I try Bluesky as well, saying the new rush of sign-ups was reminiscent of the good old days of early Twitter.
So, somewhat reluctantly, I signed up, using the same handle as on most of my other accounts: @JonChevreau. I guess part of my reasoning was that when it comes to handles it’s a bit of a land grab and I didn’t want someone else posing as me at Bluesky. That appears to have happened to Mad Money’s Jim Cramer.
Now I’d be the first to say it’s ridiculous to be active on half a dozen social media accounts. It would be nearly impossible for someone with a full-time job and long commute but as I am semi-retired and work from home, it is (barely) manageable. Like most journalists, I’m a bit of a news junkie, though my focus is primarily financial (hence this website) and secondarily, politics (on the theory that politics is always going to impact our personal Financial Independence).
Social media splitting into Red and Blue Silos
Many journalists on X have been agonizing about staying there as standards have slipped under Musk and the site is rife with misinformation, most of it right of centre. In fact at Mastodon, we generally refer to X as “the Hell site.” I see broadcaster Don Lemon just announced his departure from X and arrival on Bluesky.
The problem is of course that many of us have spent the better part of 10 or 15 years building a large network of followers on X. In my case, I restrict most of my X posts to financial content, if only to promote the latest blog from this site. To the extent site sponsors like to see their guest blogs on the site promoted as much as possible on various social media, it’s hard to make the break. It takes years to build up a following in the tens of thousands.
But between Musk buying X and now joining the incoming Trump administration, the die seems to have been inevitably cast. Social media has fragmented into political siloes. X is now a Trump propaganda machine that amplifies what Trump’s own Truth Social was doing. It’s in effect Pravda for the incoming Republican White House. Call it the Red Silo. That was likely the main reason Lemon finally departed.
What you might call the “Resistance” is Threads, Bluesky and to a lesser extent Mastodon, which together I think of as the “Blue Silo.” But in addition to departures from X, I’m also seeing lots of Threads users moving this week to Bluesky: some abandoning it altogether and others opting to become “dual citizens.” One frustration I have myself with Threads is the current limit of following no more than 7500 people. Because of the still-common practice of “reciprocal following,” that policy also curtails Follower growth to a similar number.
Let me go through my evolving personal strategy for navigating these sites. I’ll list these in the order in which I tend to use them first thing in the morning and periodically throughout the day and often evening.
1.) Mastodon
This is my first port of call, even though my Follower account there after two years is less than 10% of what it is on X. Mastodon seems to me to be a bit of a Blue (i.e. U.S. Democrat) silo, as are the next two sites I’ll list: Threads and Bluesky. Presumably many liberal Canadians are sympathetic to that political orientation although things could change soon.
Why do I give Mastodon priority? For several reasons. First, it’s NOT owned by a single billionaire who can upset the apple cart and change the rules on some arbitrary whim. As I explained in a similar post to today’s when I joined Mastodon two years ago — Life After Twitter — unlike the centralized Twitter platform (or indeed Threads or Bluesky), Mastodon is decentralized.
That’s the first thing you need to know about it when signing on. First you have to pick a server, which is run by volunteers around the world. I often get pushback from people checking out alternatives who are under the impression Mastodon is too technical.
It’s not really: all these platforms behave in a similar way, albeit with subtle differences. The main stumbling block with Mastodon is picking the “instance,” which is another word for server. I picked one of the few (or only?) Canadian ones: mstdn.ca. It’s also called Mastodon Canada and bills itself as being run by Canadians for Canadians. Note too that Mastodon is spelt with the letter o in two places, NOT the letter “a”!
The other big reason I prefer Mastodon is that unlike the billionaire-owned centralized platforms, Mastodon does not use an “algorithm” to steer content in your direction. X, Threads and Bluesky all do this to some extent: either they explicitly ask you what kind of content you want or they gradually infer what you want from the content you appear to gravitate to. Down the road, the danger is they will monetize all this for advertisers or other purposes. When they’re free, remember that YOU are the product!
Mastodon does not do that. While technically it’s “free,” there are small armies of technical people providing these instances at their own expense so they rely on some voluntary financial support from users. Since X now charges users who want the famous blue check, those X-scaping from Musk could redirect the same amount of money to Mastodon instead.
But the benefit of Mastodon is that instead of an algorithm, what you see is entirely derived by who you follow and what everyone is “boosting.” Boosting is another word for what used to be called retweeting. You can “favourite” someone’s post but that really doesn’t help anyone apart from providing a transitory dopamine rush that at least one person noticed your latest witty gem. Boosting is what drives everything on Mastodon.
In short, once you have a stable of good Follows [in effect, sources] you can start picking off THEIR follows to build your list: gradually the quality of what you absorb will improve. For starters, if you are following ubiquitous U.S. politics for what I call a new four-year cycle of 24/7 47, I recommend Laffy and Nonolex. Laffy is a Californian who just moved to Canada west coast in part because of the political situation and has a large following. She posts as @GottaLaff@mastodon.social. Nonilex is also a hardworking political observer, posting as @Nonilex@masto.ai. And finally, follow Mastodon Migration: @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online. There are also several account handles with the name Kamala in them but I’m guessing they’ll soon be renaming themselves.
2.) Threads
I joined Threads about a week after it launched in the summer of 2023. The negatives I’ve mentioned earlier: it is after all owned by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. To get on it, you first need to be on Instagram and it takes your user base there and ports it over to Threads, which is more text-intensive than the image-centric Instagram.
Even so, it’s the polar opposite of X politically: it periodically conducts what I call “Blue Follow Parties,” which means supporters of the U.S. Democratic party engage in mutual following to build their numbers. Post the election, many are finding some comfort licking their mutual wounds to commiserate about the result.
3.) Bluesky
Finally, Bluesky, which I only just joined. Again, centralized, algorithm driven and leaning to the left, since the latest surge of new arrivals was prompted by disgust over X and its increasing political propaganda. Some of the financial people I followed at X are congregating there and we use the hashtag #pfcan to highlight financial posts, which stands for Personal Finance Canada. That doesn’t necessarily mean we only talk about Canadian stocks: much of the discussion is American and global financial or macroeconomic trends but many of them are based in Canada and some, like Boomer & Echo’s Robb Engen and myself, run financial websites from Canada.
Conclusion
For most people who have day jobs, I don’t recommend spreading yourself too thin among these sites, especially considering we haven’t even discussed different platforms like Reddit, which can also suck up a lot of energy. For people who watch financial markets and politics closely, the sites discussed above are all good ways to absorb news without supporting the much-criticized “corporate media” like the legacy newspapers and cable TV stations that many voters found wanting in the run-up to the election. I’m starting to see more articles in these alternative sites and/or Substacks and YouTube vlogs about so-called “Buyer’s Remorse” among voters who didn’t seem to believe Trump’s Project 2025 would actually be implemented. Too late now!
There is something to be said for “cross-pollinating” content and followers between two and four of these sites. For the reasons covered above, Mastodon is in a league of its own and should be one of them. Any one of these sites may go down for temporary technical reasons and, as with X, future management changes may render any one of these as no longer viable.
So for those disgusted with X, my suggestion is to choose Mastodon and at least one of Threads or Bluesky. If your politics are in sync with Musk and Trump, no doubt X can be a home but it’s not for me beyond very limited tweets on financial commentary, ideally mediated through “lists” of trusted sources.
See you on the other side!
