I sometimes wish I could log back into Twitter just to see the raging dumpster fire in person, but I can’t. They don’t make it easy to close your account. You have to jump through a bunch of fiery hoops to say you want it closed, then go 30 days without logging in. Only after that do you officially disappear from Elon’s Christmas card list.
So no, I can’t drop in. But everything I hear tells me it’s not going well. Apparently, there was a massive rush for the exits after the U.S. election. I’m not sure why that didn’t happen before the election, but from what I’ve heard, it’s much, much worse now than when I left about a year ago.
Any loss in audience or reach I might’ve experienced has more than been made up for through Substack and BlueSky. This, despite being locked out of BlueSky for about six months thanks to some weird Apple iCloud password glitch. I’m back in now, though, and it feels a lot like early Twitter. Unlike Substack, it’s not full of writers, so you don’t get that oddly intense vibe that can come from being on a platform where everyone is judging everybody else’s every line.
Of course, we can’t have nice things, so that changed for me last week after I shared a Substack piece on BlueSky. I was curious about engagement across the platforms, and the results were fascinating. Despite having around 4,000 followers on BlueSky compared to the 100,000 I had on Twitter, the engagement on BlueSky was off the charts. Easily 20 times higher.
The downside? That one special fuckwit who took offence—not simply with the content of the piece, but with the fact that I dared to write it instead of something he wanted to read. He showed up in the replies, throwing fists and elbows.
My first instinct was to block him, which is one of the nice things about BlueSky: a culture of instantly blocking bad faith actors.
But this guy was so over the top, he made me laugh. Foolishly, I engaged with him. In hindsight, a mistake. It didn’t just affect me—it affected everyone who follows me. By not blocking him outright, I gave him a direct path to their screens for his nonsense. On reflection, it’s made me rethink my blocking policy.
The BlueSky flex of instantly blocking trolls without engagement is, I’ve decided, the way to go. You might occasionally block someone who’s been misunderstood—but on balance, it’s probably worth it. The reason the toxic hordes from Twitter can’t take root on BlueSky is because the moment they show up, they’re cut off by metastatic blocklists. It’s like trying to storm a castle where the defenders immediately chop your legs off.
I don’t have any grand insights beyond this, but it’s surprising to me that, even after 20 years on social media, I’m still learning—and still capable of small revelations like this.