Comment on Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X
thal3s@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I sincerely doubt 1 million regular people a day are leaving Twitter.
We’re watching bot accounts be created at scale in real time.
I think “leave” is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.
I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, “The creatives have moved to Bluesky.”
I don't think "creatives" are more active than anyone else. For the number of users, the threadiverse has a higher ratio of activity I think and it's generally more positive here than places like reddit. Maybe it's a similar thing. The demographic that are likely to move, are just making similar content and that makes it look more active.
IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.
Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.
I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.
I’ve heard of people having similar experiences on Mastodon as well. Seems like these smaller communities of early adopters tend to simply be more active and pleasant to interact with.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You underestimate the news cycle hitting regular folk who so far didn’t know alternatives existed to twitter.
jaybone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah once the mainstream media started picking up Reddit stories, that’s when Reddit started going to shit.