Let's Quit X
helloquitx.com
helloquitx.com
My profile in case you want to follow: https://bsky.app/profile/xeiaso.net
Last year, I seriously started using Bluesky. It's okay, but a little too much like "old Twitter" for my tastes. I still use it, but my most interesting posts go on Fedi.
This is all to say, Bluesky has replaced Twitter for me, but I was already phasing it out.
On Mastadon I find much smaller circles, but much more engaged.
I think bluesky is winning at discovery. If I want to feel the pulse on a topic, bluesky is winning. If I'm not even aware there's a topic that I want to feel the pulse on, bluesky is winning. But I think mastadon has been successful at curating a very different 'vibe', and I appreciate it. So I catch up on mastadon first, and then doomscroll bluesky if I need to find work for idle hands.
> Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. [0]
> FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.
> They basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anybody can build on it. [1]
That last part is not very accurate. Anybody can build on it now. Their goal is to make a second AT Proto Relay [2] that is not under the control of Bluesky.
[1] https://www.usermag.co/p/freeourfeeds-a-30m-plan-to-take-bac...
So, I am optimistic.
It was my understanding that with most social networks the moderation is usually very opaque/can only be gleaned from public comments. Examples would help to understand how BlueSky would systematically moderate differently than Twitter (or what the ban process is like).
Interestingly, if blocks are public, I guess you can audit the state of the interconnectedness between people, (seemingly what https://clearsky.app/ does?) and therefore, what has happened to the people odious enough to receive these blocks but not odious enough to be banned.
Also, though, it has significantly better self-serve moderation tools than Twitter ever did (they _kind_ of existed for pre-Musk Twitter as third-party stuff, though Musk's API changes broke most of them). For instance, I subscribe to a moderation list which auto-blocks transphobes, so I don't have to read their One Joke again and again (seriously, they've pretty much had the one thing for the last 20 years; you'd think they could at least come up with some new material). People who, er, enjoy the one joke are of course free to enjoy it by not subscribing to that mod list.
I do expect it to get worse over time as more people join, tbh; the current user base is rather self-selecting. But I don't think it will get as bad as current-Twitter. If it does, er, onto the next thing, I suppose.
But, assume that bsky does turn to shit too... if nothing else the (successful?) migration from X shows that people are capable of moving - should bsky face its own calamity the friction to move again will be lower.
There's reason to hope that it won't end in total disaster though. It should (at some point) be possible to federate with bsky in a meaningful way, and perhaps a migration can be even easier than this one (i.e. you can switch to another instance that is run differently).
When a MAGA civil war broke out on there around Christmas last year, accounts that opposed Elon were either disabled or lost their verified status.
You also can’t share links without their feed algorithm limiting your reach.
All social networks are censored in some form.
Your attempt at gaslighting is pathetic.
Of course, maybe that's fine, some people prefer it that way. But, for me, it seems nice to have a common place where organizations put out announcements.
[0] https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2025/01/2024-internet-...
He says Section 230 is on the chopping and extinction block in 2025 and he would be shocked if it made it to 2026.
I've basically stopped using it.
Honest question: I left Twitter so long ago (I guess that I never got it) and am not really using Mastodon... so I think that I'm not the right people
It’s very difficult to do unless you can have broad consensus. I tend to use Twitter for an industry wide group and while a few individuals have moved, the Bluesky version just doesn’t have the reach or usefulness of the twitter or x version.
Yeah but it's a left wing echo chamber and that's good! /s
Incognito window > bsky > discovery feed > every post is about US politics, Trump bad, rich people bad, Musk bad etc. Same shit just different colors
Bsky is not the answer, the only answer is not to use social media at all. And more or less that applies to HN too.
For now it's very much dominated by Twitter ex-pats, and that gives it a pretty predictable slant. Unlike Twitter however this isn't being imposed by the owner, it's organic.
They love the notion of the marketplace of ideas until said marketplace tells them to kick rocks and then it's crocodile tears.
Sigh
Bsky lacks (1) ads, (2) paying posters rewarded with promoted reach, and (3) a default algorithmic feed (Discover is algorithmic and exists, but the default feed unless unpinned is always Following.) It also has shareable feeds, as well as the default pinned feeds.
Each of these individually makes most users experience of Bluesky a lot more seeing what they choose to see than seeing what the site owner has a financial or other interest in everyone seeing, which in a sense makes it more likely to be a personal echo chamber rather than a single echo chamber or the mythical perfectly unbiased online marketplace of ideas.
OTOH, it also got a lot of users specifically in reaction to negative feelings about the central ideological direction perceived at X, which may make it on average more left-wing by comparison, if very much not uniformly left-wing or having any fundamental trait tending toward remaining even relatively left-wing.
Obviously, this is going to be a problem with any site that becomes the town square, just like how Yelp and TripAdvisor eventually became so gamed as to be mostly useless. The question to me is can bluesky rise to the level of being useful w/o succumbing to the pitfalls that come with being ubiquitous.
I think though that Trump truly is worse. If you made this comment in 2008 or 2012 and used Trump or McCain I’d say you are right. But what happens when a person truly is a vile disgusting human being? Then it no longer becomes the same shit. As an extreme example, Kerensky wasn’t as bad as the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t the same shit.
That is the only correct answer. To essentially delete all your social media accounts.
If one wants to stop their alcohol addiction for example (Using Facebook, X), is not done by switching the brand of alcohol (Threads, Bluesky).
It is done by stopping altogether (by deleting all your accounts) and only you can do that.
For the Palisades fire, I'm struggling to make X nearly as useful as it was. There is a lot of random diatribe and speculation but on-the-ground facts just don't appear.
The juice is gone.
Wow delving deep into people's psyche and calling them out on HN, why ?
Saying I'm calling someone out though seems a bit of a reach.
Now I struggle to find regular updates and half the accounts I used to follow are idle. By the time that third party twitter processor I had worked for shut down, the cadence of posts were so scheduled it was obviously driven by bots and not organic reactions. Even major world events would be gamed by bots as fast as real reactions which had significantly decreased on their own.
I haven't found a replacement to be fair, but I definitely see the enshittification of it from an incredibly useful short form broadcast channel to an engagement-gamified advertising megaphone.
what's a -stan? do you mean like kazakhstan?
News flash: X is already an echo chamber!
Maybe the "oh no don't leave for an echo chamber!" assertion is a case of people remembering the pre-X version of twitter, and comparing competitors to that - rather than what X is today. Or maybe it's a case of "boiling a frog," where people on X are actually unaware of what it has become.
Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
I won't pretend to speak to the motivations of any HN users, but I've seen some of these conversations play out where someone invokes the concept of an echo chamber only when it means LGBTQIA+ people can just exist without being harassed. That's an undesirable outcome to those folks.
I would like to think HN is better than that, but more frequently in the past few months, I've been disappointed by commentators on this website, so I wouldn't put any money on that bet.
Echo chambers can be dangerous, but misinformation and unchecked bigotry are more dangerous. Whereas the consequences of an echo chamber are abstract, I can measure the consequences of the latter in deaths.
So my go-to question is simply, "What are your priorities?"
Unless you are a sports fan.
It's unfortunate that X still retains a greater reach than its alternatives, but that can change in the medium term.
With X I can control my own feed by using the followers tab.
The reason I only visit FB once a month to check for messages from some people who still use Messenger.
There was a part of the suggestions that I liked! The algorithm was working for me!
Now it’s 100% pure toxic outrage bait.
How's that? Bluesky, say, has a fair bit of diverse opinion. It's low on the far-right (though there are certainly some; I subscribe to a few blocklists to filter their nonsense out), which has a bit of a personal affinity for Musk, but to an extent, y'know, who needs 'em? Like, it is not the case that there exist two opinions, far-right lunacy and everything else; the non-far-right segment contains multitudes.
From that vantage point it is the conscious decision to stay on the network during an exodus that creates an echo chamber. Something similar happened with facebook. The people who are still on facebook in 2025 are having a pretty different conversation than occurs in some other places.
I still log to Twitter once a week to check, there haven't been anything new in my following feed for at least a month beside the people cross posting.
So I can easily see myself do just that, I wouldn't miss anything anyway.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241226192120/https://www.hello...
In your analogy - moderation is part of the format.
Now I’m still on Nostr so I haven’t kicked my social media addiction yet, but at least on Nostr I get to pick and choose which of any, algorithm is forging my timeline.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
and yes, I know it has its problems, but it is still a fine platform for many things and many people!
Now I'm going to actually delete my account.
The solution is true mesh network with financial incentive to "host" the content. Imagine kinda of like bittorrent seeding where the longer you seed the more you "mine crypto". I'm too dumb to build such a thing, but that is the solution.
A true peer to peer network where all content is hosted and nothing can be brought down. you locally choose to "hide politics", "hide porn", "hide violence" and that's it.
the web as it was intended, free information.
The issue with unmoderated content is that it always devolves into a neonazis and other hateful/deranged groups echo chamber, and everyone else leaves because frankly who wants to engage with that? Look at 4chan for an example.
you've given the left pov, but it's not accurate.
twitter was neutral, then twitter "went left" by censoring the right.
then musk bought twitter (renamed it X) and stopped censoring the right but did not censor the left; but a certain type of left person can't tolerate the right not being censored so they left first to the fediverse and now to bluesky
X is open to all; bluesky is a population of people who are not open to all
I'd love to read why, but the site is down...
However, over the last few months, Twitter/X has clearly become a propaganda tool that promotes a particular worldview (I won't say "a political party" because Elon Musk's project seems broader than just U.S. politics).
I feel like the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange: in one quick scroll, you'll see explosions, puppies, tits, Nazi supporters, and Elon Musk's tweets all mixed together.
Now, i agree it's time to leave the platform. He is going way too far using a social network to push his own agenda, is too evident why he spent 60 billon on this.
I see more and more post disappearing and since you can't vouch unless the post is completely dead it just gets buried.
But I already did quit, remobed my X ID a few months ago.
My initial take on this is that it's probably just another one of a thousand "let's self-sort ourselves by political bias".
BlueSky has a CP problem (enter "does BlueSky have a CP problem" into your favorite search engine). BlueSky also has a problem with moderation; the pile-ons are trying to eradicate opposing (read: non-leftist) points of view. Don't take my word for it; it's even been reported here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159454
Facebook is full of ads, but at least finally Meta (or at least Zuckerberg) decided to ditch the "fact checkers" which were just a thin veneer over "suppressing non-leftist points-of-view".
X seems fun to me now but I am nervous that Yaccarino is starting to deviate from Musk's free speech vision in order to appease advertising cartels.
Truth is a right wing echo chamber.
Gab is an anti-semitic cesspool.
Telegram is annoying as its subscription/follow model is spammy.
No experience with Parler.
So overall I'm happy with X. YMMV. Don't put yourself in an echo chamber.
The underlying issue is that the structure of these services is short form and uni-directional. It's the internet's megaphone. This is great celebrities and media outlets, because it acts more as a megaphone than as a discussion forum. However, it is also great for low-information, bumper-sticker politics. The limited text entry deliberately disincentivizes nuance, thus will not be conducive to good-faith disagreement, and instead forces participants into a team sports style of arguing.
Perhaps there is a local minima where each political paradigm ends up on a different system, but social networks are natural monopolies, especially when they take the form of a megaphone. Thus, they should always try to reorganize themselves into a single provider, leading to the exact same conflict-prone environment that was created on Twitter. That Bluesky now feels peasant now is exactly that the user base is a self-selected group, as one of the platforms becomes dominant again, one can only assume the conflict-prone structure of the service will again assert itself.
For now, I'll stay on Reddit. Admittedly imperfect, but it's a place where nuance can and does show up.
It’s been really mentally liberating.
The media moved from hating Trump to Musk because the latter appears to hold more political power over the former, he already got his ways on H1B visas and a few other issues.
Musk also appears quite pathetic/sociopathic to non-MAGAs. He has many children he barely sees and often insults online, he was caught lying about a video game recently, and that's not even bringing up the sexual assault allegations.
He also switched from supporting Obama and considering himself a socialist to becoming the largest donor of the GOP in a few years.
Also, please reread Big Brother, because that comparison is very misplaced.
Some of these problems pre-dated Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and some of them will no doubt eventually plague BlueSky as well. But that is kind of the way of social media, nothing lasts forever and people tend to hop from one sinking ship to another.
As for not understanding why people hate Musk. I am loathe to get into politics on this site, but he is (himself) actively using X as a platform to meddle and stoke tensions in a number of democracies throughout the world. That is part of why a lot of people dislike him, and it also casts further doubt on X's future viability as a global content distribution channel, if countries start blocking it.
What do you think was happening on Twitter before Musk turned it into X?
Not 1984 but just standard 20th century type dangerous cult of personality with one person having way too much power.
But if it's not Musk, it's the DNC, if it's not the DNC, it's someone else. I don't see how it detracts from X still being a good platform. You have to curate your TL, yes -- but you've always had to do that!
When are we quitting telegram by the way?
This is, excuse my French, either incredibly fucking stupid or extremely disingenuous. I'm not going to go over every case of censorship under previous management, but it was all astoundingly evident: there was an aberrant woke bias whereby they strongly silenced everything even just a tad unaligned with that reality-denying, pseudomoralistic, corporativist ideology that the powers that be has so brutally taken advantage of.
If I quit X (I did), it wasn't because it turned into an echo chamber--on the contrary, it stopped being one, as it is now pretty balanced, according to data on it. It was rather because its fundamental design was already focused on compulsive, mindless consumption of junk, and now it's that, but increased manyfold, exactly the same as the abhorrent characteristics that make it more of a walled-garden. I cannot use it just on principle. To my mind, the web should be open and discovery of content should respect intentional and sovereign behavior, not promote addiction and lack of mental hygiene.
Honestly, how pathetic. The liberal is the man who doesn't want to talk or listen to anyone who disagrees with him. It's not hard to understand why half the country hates Musk and their fellow citizens on X, but listening is fundamental to maintenance of the polis. Anyhow, I'm on both X and BlueSky.