Twitter's not doing too bad:
550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates
So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
That's aside from the blatant echo chamber nature of the platform. Both the left and the right post on Twitter. Only the left post on BlueSky.
This probably contributes to the decline, but I think the biggest contributor is the lack of interesting content. If you wanted to gorge on leftist viewpoints wouldn't you just read a leftist subreddit?
BlueSky isn't an experience set by the owners, it's an experience set by interacting with its people.
In a way it's good: X is now much better that the more radical Bluesky types went away.
Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything.
Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.
Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Indistinguishable from Stormfront. And his account (along with other far-right accounts) are the most engaged-with accounts on the platform.
They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually.
It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets.
Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
Being small enough that malicious actors are not interested in you is beneficial, but by definition it is a solution that cannot be widely adopted.