#ElectionTwitter

2024-11-17

Bluesky’s blockbuster week

Something remarkable has happened in social media over the last seven days: A non-trivial number of people hit a personal breaking point with X, Threads or both and either set up Bluesky accounts or started using ones there that they’d left dormant for months.

Since last weekend, the decentralized short-form social platform launched in 2019 as a Twitter research project and that required an invite code to use only nine months ago has seen its user totals climb by about a million people a day above previously modest numbers–from more than 15 million users on Wednesday to above 18 million users per a real-time count Saturday night. As I write this, Bluesky sits atop the chart of free Android apps and is ranked second after Netflix in the iOS free-apps chart.

My own follower total has about tripled over the past week, which looks like table-stakes growth compared to what other people have reported.

But the stats barely tell the tale. So many of the people whom I used to regard as my reward for putting up with the noise of Twitter even after Elon Musk’s conquest of the platform have pivoted to posting mainly or only on Bluesky. Some examples: the avgeek community (but not yet airlines), a recently-growing slice of Election Twitter, even some of my local elected representatives and such local appointed political types as Metro’s can-do general manager Randy Clarke.

(Disclosure: I sent a constituent e-mail last Friday to the youngest member of the Arlington County Board, Maureen Coffey, asking her to try meeting her constituents on Bluesky and suggesting two Arlington-related starter packs of people to follow. Coffey has since become an active user, not that I necessarily had anything to do with that.)

Many of these new Bluesky arrivals appear to have reacted to Musk putting his billionaire foot on the scale to support Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House by outright deleting their Twitter/X accounts, then sharing a screenshot or a GIF on Bluesky of their “X-it.”

(I’m keeping my Xitter account public and not deleting my past tweets—I’ve linked to them too many times, and sometimes find that the easiest way to find an old link is to search for a tweet that shared it. I also continue to read X, although that’s become increasingly unnecessary over just the past week.)

Other recent Bluesky converts have pointed to Meta downranking political and news discussions on Threads in favor of… whatever Meta’s inscrutable algorithm shoves into the “for your” timeline that I can’t opt out of on the platform that still gets far more traffic than Bluesky. As former Republican campaign strategist turned never-Trump activist Rick Wilson wrote Monday on Bluesky: “I’d hoped threads would be at least somewhat flexible about political content, but here we are.”

Everybody can bring their own reason for making this decision. Mine starts with business logic–why should I bother sharing my work on X when that site downranks posts with links?–but cannot be separated from Musk’s moves to turn that platform into his own right-wing propaganda playground. Especially when that playground has welcomed back such loathsome liars as disgraced conspiracy “theorist” Alex Jones.

Meanwhile, I can’t look at the Threads app icon on my phone without thinking of how Meta has consistently shown how little it values my profession. Or how the day-to-day experience of algorithmically-pushed slop on Facebook makes me wonder what Threads will look like once it starts welcoming advertisers.

For several months, I thought that Mastodon might be the short-form-social escape pod I needed, but Bluesky has delivered a simpler setup experience and, more importantly, is built on an open-source protocol that allows for a complete export of your account to another server. That option exists more in theory than in practice to date, but it’s not possible at X and consists only of a sort of settings portability at Mastodon. Bluesky is now the better bet.

So that’s how I am refusing to stay with a platform owned by somebody who considers people in my line of work an obsolete obstacle–or to switch to another platform owned by somebody else who seems to sees little more value in my profession. I may not stop either of those services from ending up with the most eyeballs, but that doesn’t require me to lend my own eyeballs, much less my own typing fingers, to their causes.

#ATProto #Bluesky #bsky #ElectionTwitter #ElonMuskTwitter #fediverse #Mastodon #skeets #socialMedia #tweets #X #XOdus #Xit

Photo of the top-free-apps chart in the U.S. Play Store, as seen in a Pixel 8 phone held above a laptop screen showing a picture I took of intersecting contrails as seen from a flight between Houston and Austin. You can see a window above the phone, with a blue sky visible through the skylight.
2024-11-02

Nearing a year since I swore off propping up the former Twitter with free writing as my response to Elon Musk inviting loathsome conspiracy liar Alex Jones back on that service, I do not miss posting on X one bit. And as more of the people I enjoyed seeing on that platform have begun popping up on Bluesky (most recently, much of the avgeek community), I also find I need to read X less and less–and I can do so with a quick check of the lists that I compiled years ago.

But there’s one stubborn exception to that pattern that’s become even harder to back away from over the past few weeks: the Election Twitter list I created too many years ago for me to remember.

The pollsters, vote counters, campaign strategists, journalists and analysts on that list generally know what they’re talking about (although the Nate Silver of 2024 is clearly not the guy we knew in 2008), and as the 2024 election season hurtles to a close I find myself returning to this list annoyingly often.

I can’t attest that this constant refreshing is making me that much more informed about the state of the Harris and Trump campaigns. After 2016, I can’t put too much stock in polls–certainly not when the New York Times’ Nate Cohn feels compelled to answer the question “So, Can We Trust The Polls?” by reminding readers that they are not a precision instrument and may be even less precise from attempts by pollsters to avoid repeats of past misses of Trump voters.

On-the-ground reports about how many people are voting and where their support might lie can be more informative (and as a poll worker, I like to see high turnout), but they, too, cannot dispel much uncertainty in advance.

Because I can’t take the hint and stick to reading reported pieces about the state of the race (for example, Dana Milbank’s examination in the Washington Post of the Harris field operation, or Tim Alberta’s feature in the Atlantic looking into the chaotic inside of the Trump campaign), I’ve tried to recreate this list on Bluesky. But my ElectionSky list remains only a faint echo of the one part of X where I still find some utility. I have to blame that on the nearly complete lack of interest in see in X alternatives among these election tweeps, even as Musk continues to try to turn their hangout into a Truth Social knockoff.

I still think that will change–nothing I see in Musk’s mismanagement of this platform makes me think it will get better, while Bluesky’s leadership continues to take smart if sometimes small steps to build out that decentralized platform. But the social-media shift that I hope to see clearly isn’t happening between now and Tuesday.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/11/02/ex-twitters-last-lock-on-my-attention-is-at-its-worst-right-now/

#2024Election #Bluesky #campaign #ElectionTwitter #ElonMuskTwitter #groundGame #polling #polls #X #Xitter

An iPad showing a few posts from my Election Twitter list, with a story about campaign polls from Friday's print edition of the Washington Post underneath it.
Harry Underwoodharrybeary@union.place
2024-01-29

@TruthSandwich researching the voting history of North Columbus-Muscogee and I can’t help thinking about this meme from #ElectionTwitter:

Picture of Human hand holding up a radiation meter, with a digital screen showing the words “Hitler Particle Emission Confirmed” followed by four alert symbols
Harry Underwoodharrybeary@union.place
2023-11-28

Those maps on #ElectionTwitter showing how much Biden would have won in, say, #Louisiana if Louisiana’s white voters voted like how white voters vote in, say, #Ohio, are a decent fantasy projection.

There’s only one way to come close to manifesting it IRL: “find your people”.

Build your constituency as close nearby as possible in order to win the power you seek, even if not in your home state. In that way lies more #Virginia, and less #Mississippi, in the #DeepSouth. #uspol #vapol

LauraRBelinLauraRBelin
2023-09-24

My first thoughts on the rematch in Iowa's first Congressional district between Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan and U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks:
(Is there a hashtag here comparable to the old ?)

bleedingheartland.com/2023/09/

2023-08-19

Bad idea (just a mockup not a real edit)
#wikipedia #electiontwitter #politicalcompass

Section of a Wikipedia infobox showing Political Compass test values (Lib+4.8, Left+4.1 in 2019) with an associated chart
NE Progressive 🚲🏛️🇺🇸🇺🇦NEnewDealfan003
2023-07-01

pals if any of you are here after Elon fucked the app, tell me in the replies and we can become moots on here as the crisis continues.

2023-06-05

Yeah, Political Twitter has been a miserable expirence for a long time, other than #ElectionTwitter which is still mostly here. I much prefer a Twitter where I can follow subinterests like the NBA and there's not an amplified Main Thread that's nearly always a political argument. twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg…

Political Twitter has been dying for a while, decaying into stale talking points, sloganeering, and personal feuds. But there are other Twitters that operate in completely different universes, like Baseball Twitter, that are still perfectly functional. It's a jarring contrast. https://t.co/CguKL4dPfV
Alex O. DiazAlexODiaz
2023-02-09

In 1964 LBJ defeated Barry Goldwater in Nevada by double digits. This would be the last time a Democrat would carry Nevada at the Presidential Level until 1992.

2022-12-22

Down in the 5th District, voters elected James Madison, defeating James Monroe with 57% of the vote. After a rematch between these two a year later Madison won with a crushing 98% of the vote, propelling him to higher office. I wonder what happened to Monroe after that awful loss

#ElectionMastodon #ElectionTwitter #mapping

That Clerk Rachelbadachie@masthead.social
2022-12-18

This is a fun time to be on #ElectionTwitter
---
RT @elonmusk
Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.
twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16

Sage Of Time 🇵🇷SageOfTime@newsie.social
2022-12-16
2022-12-16

Oh yes and #electiontwitter #election folks. How could I forget you? Some of you make S-tier shitposts and yet even better analysis

Jean Thoensenjeanthoensen
2022-11-22

Should we start an hashtag to honor @electionbabe and her legacy of ?

MauraAlwyen 🐘MauraAlwyen
2022-11-21

This piece below is from @electionbabe 's pinned twitter post. She created the hash tag in 2016, she went on to create Magical Ballot Fairies in September of 2018 presented in ordinary-times.com/2018/09/24/ Two terms that are now in the American Lexicon.

was not created by an academic, political operative, or cartographer. It was created by a pollworker/stay at home mom. Don’t ever think that you aren’t good enough to start something that matters.

I understand that writing a #introduction is useful round here?

Well, my @ here is the same or similar to most of my other socials. I'm more of a follower than a poster, so please friend me and don't worry about spam if you're into: #eurovision, #videogames, #gaymer, #f1, or from #electiontwitter. Also, any good accounts to follow to find the #jokes, #shitposts, and related stuff that many of us love(d) twitter for? I know there is plenty of that here too, so would some recommendations!

2022-11-18

Hi Mastodon! I’m Jen, an author, digital communications expert, and political science scholar.

I’m passionate about #GenZ #civilrights #votingrights #abortionrights and was an active member of #ElectionTwitter on that “other platform.”

Give me a follow if you’re interested in young voters and the future of our democracy 👋🏻

2022-11-16

We need to transpose #ElectionTwitter here, perhaps #ElectionTooter?

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