https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/23/ive-joined-bluesky-and-it-feels-like-a-breath-of-fresh-air-in-some-ways
As I write, there’s a window on my laptop screen that is providing a live view of a stampede. It’s logging the numbers of people joining the social network Bluesky. At the moment, the number of registered users is 20.5 million. By the time you read this there will be more than 30 million of them, judging by the rate that people are currently joining.
The proximate cause of it is the role that Elon Musk, owner of X (née Twitter), played in the election of Donald Trump, when a significant proportion of the platform’s 200 million-plus users realised that they’d been had – that they had, in effect, been useful idiots for Musk on his path to the centre of political power.
There had been an “Xodus” once before – in October 2022, when Musk took over Twitter – as people fled to a new, open-source network called Mastodon, but it was on a much smaller scale. At its peak in November 2022 it had 2.5 million users, but that number has dropped to just under 1 million now. The stampede to Bluesky is on an altogether bigger scale.
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