I think this kind of thing is interesting from a social media "elasticity" type perspective. How quickly could can / will people move from a large social network to another (regardless of the reasons) or just not use it anymore?
The fact that "yeah but a significant number of users always could just leave" is always out there but I'm not sure we have much info on how, when, why, how likely it is for these things to occur.
I also wonder how much celeb impact there is, if any, vs just volume of acquaintances. I suspect different networks are different in that regard.
The long term trend is that "scenes" burn out and get replaced by new scenes. When it comes to NYC nightclubs, for instance, Studio 54, the Mudd Club and the CBGB were big once and then people moved on. This was the pattern in electronic communication, in the 1980s there was always a new BBS that was the coolest in town and you more or less expected and as the web came along technology was advancing and most sites weren't really profitable anyway so you expected some to go downhill and to move on to the next thing. Remember AOL, AIM, Yahoo, MySpace, etc?
In the Facebook era this changed for a number of reasons, not least that Facebook attracted a "normcore" audience of family, friends from school and other people who just weren't interested in being part of the latest scene.
Certainly since the X-odus started we've heard from many online celebrities that they don't feel they can move because they are afraid that they won't be able to rebuild their audience. I've been talking with a friend about this problem (and related problems) and personally I think Bluesky's got it. Bluesky is doing a lot visibility and behind the scenes such that left wing journalists with 95k followers on Twitter can rapidly jump to Bluesky and get 250k followers -- and higher quality followers because most of these people just joined and haven't had years to abandon their account. Each time somebody like Springsteen moves over other celebrities will see they can do the same.
> Bluesky is doing a lot visibility and behind the scenes such that left wing journalists with 95k followers on Twitter can rapidly jump to Bluesky and get 250k followers
For journalists in particular, I suspect that that it largely because Twitter appears to heavily suppress posts with links in them; a "hey I wrote a thing in [newspaper]" post on Bluesky may end up with a lot of visibility if people are interested in the article, but on Twitter it will have practically none, because of the link thing.
I think this kind of thing is interesting from a social media "elasticity" type perspective. How quickly could can / will people move from a large social network to another (regardless of the reasons) or just not use it anymore?
The fact that "yeah but a significant number of users always could just leave" is always out there but I'm not sure we have much info on how, when, why, how likely it is for these things to occur.
I also wonder how much celeb impact there is, if any, vs just volume of acquaintances. I suspect different networks are different in that regard.
Happened with MySpace, even though the web was kinda new to most people and MySpace wasn't as established as Facebook/X/Instagram are now
Also, Livejournal, and to a large extent Tumblr. And _endless_ webforums. And Freenode. And USENET.
I would love to see a network effects study on this, and this is a perfect natural experiment (which does not occur often).
The long term trend is that "scenes" burn out and get replaced by new scenes. When it comes to NYC nightclubs, for instance, Studio 54, the Mudd Club and the CBGB were big once and then people moved on. This was the pattern in electronic communication, in the 1980s there was always a new BBS that was the coolest in town and you more or less expected and as the web came along technology was advancing and most sites weren't really profitable anyway so you expected some to go downhill and to move on to the next thing. Remember AOL, AIM, Yahoo, MySpace, etc?
In the Facebook era this changed for a number of reasons, not least that Facebook attracted a "normcore" audience of family, friends from school and other people who just weren't interested in being part of the latest scene.
Certainly since the X-odus started we've heard from many online celebrities that they don't feel they can move because they are afraid that they won't be able to rebuild their audience. I've been talking with a friend about this problem (and related problems) and personally I think Bluesky's got it. Bluesky is doing a lot visibility and behind the scenes such that left wing journalists with 95k followers on Twitter can rapidly jump to Bluesky and get 250k followers -- and higher quality followers because most of these people just joined and haven't had years to abandon their account. Each time somebody like Springsteen moves over other celebrities will see they can do the same.
See https://bsky.app/profile/officialbruce.bsky.social
> Bluesky is doing a lot visibility and behind the scenes such that left wing journalists with 95k followers on Twitter can rapidly jump to Bluesky and get 250k followers
For journalists in particular, I suspect that that it largely because Twitter appears to heavily suppress posts with links in them; a "hey I wrote a thing in [newspaper]" post on Bluesky may end up with a lot of visibility if people are interested in the article, but on Twitter it will have practically none, because of the link thing.
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