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It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Bluesky has been a net negative for US politics. They corralled everyone on the left into a little glass fishbowl where they shout at one another & everyone else ignores them. Meanwhile, all the pols & institutions stayed on X & are being dragged farther right.

Very telling that so many people are interpreting this as a defense of X.

All right, well, it seems I did not communicate my point very effectively! I doubt anyone involved in this goofy pile-on cares what I really think, but, just for the sake of posterity, let me clarify a few points.

I did not say, and do not think: 1) That X is "better" than Bsky. 2) That anyone should feel the slightest obligation to return to X, or indeed to engage with any social media in any way other than whatever makes them happy. 3) That it is Bsky's "fault" that X sucks or that people left it.

What happened was, Musk bought X & started pushing it in a nazi direction. This prompted a semi-mass exodus (including me). But the exodus basically petered out. To my dismay -- & to their eternal discredit -- lots & lots of prominent people, journos, institutions, experts, brands, etc. stayed.

This has left us in what is, IMO, a shitty equilibrium, something like the worst of both worlds. Enough libs (& only libs) left that Bsky basically became a lib echo chamber. (People are trying to deny this, but, c'mon.) But enough people stayed that prominent people can still convince themselves...

...that it's "the public square." So prominent people are continuing to have their brains cooked. Lots of mainstream journos are being dragged right in ways that are obvious from the outside, if not clear to them. X's malign effect on the body politic is maybe *moderately* reduced, but still awful.

In other words, the exodus wasn't quite big enough to a) drain X of its malign power, or b) make Bsky big & varied enough to attract a wider array of people (esp. normies) & give it serious juice of its own. The equilibrium we've settled into is worse, IMO, than pre-Musk Twitter. Worse for everyone!

This obviously not Bsky's *fault* or the fault of anyone on it. (This obsession with how to apportion blame is one of the weirder aspects of this particular pile-on.) And obviously it's not going to help anything for people to go back to X! It's toxic. More people should leave it!

My point is just that the current equilibrium sucks. Neither X nor Bsky is as varied or fun as pre-Musk Twitter. Libs leaving X made X worse but did not make Bsky great. Elite dipshits are still getting dragged right & Bsky doesn't have the juice to counteract it. What to do about it? I don't know!

I'm under no illusions that these follow-on clarifications are going to do anything to stem the pile-on. They never do. It'll wear itself out eventually like they all do. But I thought maybe one or two of you out there might be curious about what I was actually trying to say. Anyway, carry on!

Adding (and then I'm really done): what I'd really like to see is for Bluesky to grow enough to develop enough gravity to draw attention away from X. But it's not growing, it's shrinking. I don't know what to do about it or how to reverse it, but that is the situation.

I might even find that a slight source of optimism were I not certain, based on the experience of the last 10 years, that what comes next will somehow be even worse.