There's not much more a person can do for freedom than to cowardly run once people, who don't agree with you, get to open their mouth without being banned.
You can call it running away but it's not out of fear, it's because the quality of discussion dropped to nothing. It didn't used to be that bad when a post broke containment. I've had great discussions on HN with people who disagree with me on very fundamental issues on political topics and I would describe it as polite and informative.
Where exactly is there "quality of discussion", if we include low quality responses in that rating, in any political space that isn't siloed? It doesn't exist today, and if the space is siloed then it also doesn't exist by definition.
It's okay to want to go where people agree with you more, even if it's because others aren't allowed in. But call it what it is, and note what it isn't.
Cool. Twitter has made this much more difficult, by (a) embracing a pay-for-attention model, where bluetick replies, which are rarely worth looking at, are artificially promoted and (b) by making mass-blocking far more difficult (through the death of the API). So, people are sensibly going to Bluesky, which provides a better product, with sensible, choosable reply prioritisation, and a first-party blocklist system.
Like a big part of what's going on here is that Twitter is a way worse product than it used to be, while on the other hand better competing products exist in a way that they did not before. It's pretty natural under those circumstances that people go from the bad product to the good product. This is, broadly, how most dead social networks have died, both those which actively made themselves worse (livejournal, Digg, Tumblr), and those which were merely overtaken (Friendster, Myspace, Slashdot).
Looking forward to monitoring the "death of twitter" and the victory of bluesky.
I'm sure that Bluesky was having a normal one!
Like, Twitter is clearly _worse_ with promotion of bluetick replies than it was without it; I don't think that's really controversial. That gives platforms which do not do that an advantage. Do I think Twitter is outright unusable in its current state? No, though it's getting there. But it's certainly way more _unpleasant_ to use than it used to be, and increasingly viable alternatives exist, so it's unclear to me why you'd expect people to bother using Twitter.
For every person that mirrors your sentiment, there is someone who doesn't. And then the same would hold for your opinion about the relative usability of other platforms.
It's unclear to me why you'd expect "people" (in quotes bc using that word to encompass everyone is strange in this context) to not use X and to be more approving of other platforms.
Last, its unlikely that any platform that primarily exists as a response to another platform will ever have a primary use as anything else. For example, Bluesky's future is likely only to be as a protest platform contra X. This is its identity that it will have difficulty shedding.
btw freedom of speech doesn't exist anywhere to begin with. Even in the self proclaimed "land of the free" you can't swear on public tv lmao, libel, slander, obscenity, fraud, &c. are all illegal. Meanwhile nobody talks about freedom of press even though the US ranks closer to Hungary than western europe, so much for freedom of speech...
Reminder that twitter is a bubble in the internet, which itself also is a bubble, and that real life exists out there.
"You cowards! Come back! We've got multiple drug resistant e coli on special this week!"