Did Bluesky Win or Did X Lose?

"She only won because I lost. That's not a winner."

"Network effects" refer to situations where a product becomes more valuable to individual users the more total users there are. It's commonly applied to social media platforms -- one wants to be on, for example, Facebook because that's where the people are; a Facebook that had a small user base wouldn't be a lot of fun even if its features and product functionality were vastly superior. On a darker level, network effects are often cited as a reason why it's so difficult to leave even bad or malfunctioning social media platforms -- we're "stuck" there, even if there's widespread agreement that another platform would be better, because of the collective action problem of coordinating a mass decamping to an alternative.

For a long time, Twitter was held out as the epitome of a network effect in action -- because everyone was there, everyone had to be there; leaving Twitter for a competing platform was the equivalent of leaving a bustling party and deciding to shout into a boundless void. This sense of Twitter as a de facto monopoly gave at least some measure of credence at efforts to regulate it as a "common carrier" or "public square" -- the idea being that if Twitter "censored" (banned, throttled, or deprioritized) certain people or views, it was tantamount to blocking them from the premier domain of public conversation.

Now, of course, we are seeing Bluesky ascend as a truly viable alternative to Twitter X. For my part, I've been exclusively on Bluesky for several months (I joined in July 2023, but like many for a long time I straddled both platforms). By now, I'm close to my peak follower account on Twitter, and my engagement on Bluesky is at least as robust (if not better) than it was on Twitter. And while Bluesky isn't wholly immune to some of the worst elements of "old" Twitter, it is generally in my experience a nicer and more humane place (arguably compared to the Twitter of yore, certainly compared to the cesspool its devolved into as of late).

From my vantage point, seeing Bluesky challenge and, in certain domains, topple Twitter is unprecedented territory. The closest analogue I can think of is Facebook dislodging Myspace, but I don't know (genuinely, I don't) if Myspace was as ubiquitous and dominant in its domain as Twitter was. Outside of that, it's hard to think of a titan that's fallen as far, from as high, as Twitter did. How did this happen? How did Bluesky overcome the network effect hurdle to emerge as a viable alternative? 

I have two stories, and I'm genuinely unsure which is more persuasive.

Story #1 is that Bluesky's emergence shows that the network effect, while certainly real, isn't as big of a hurdle to change as people thought. We're not actually stuck with incumbent social media providers come hell or high water. There's inertia militating against change, but it's not insurmountable. Bluesky is winning because it is fundamentally better than X is right now, as well as better than the other X competitors (Threads, Mastodon, Post) that emerged over the last few years. It's making better choices about the use (or not) of algorithms, it's making better choices about doing content moderation, it made better choices about growing responsibly, and it's reaping the fruits of making those better choices that appeal to more people.

Overall, the moral of this story is that the concerns about Twitter as a functional monopoly that could singlehandedly manipulate the public square without any possibility of public recourse or accountability have been falsified. And that, of course, has implications for the rest of the social media space -- many of our worries about undislodgeable tech monopolies maybe seem overblown. What a relief!

Story #2, which is probably less hopeful but might generate more primal glee inside of me, is that the basic narrative of network effects creating entrenched monopolies is still true, but Elon Musk so epically and catastrophically mismanaged Twitter that he managed to destroy it anyway. Keeping in mind that Musk didn't actually want to buy Twitter in the first place (he made his offer as a troll, only to be forced into a sale when Twitter's leadership realized this was their best chance to cashout at inflated prices), every choice he's made since assuming ownership has been a disaster borne out of his own infinite depth of arrogance and boundless need for public affirmation. 

He had a company with universal brand recognition; he renamed it for no reason. He complained about Twitter allegedly censoring speech to put its thumb on the political scales; he converted X into an explicit megaphone for Donald Trump and far-right MAGA politics. He whined about bots taking over the platform; bots are even more ubiquitous than they were before. Ad sales are down because advertisers don't like their brands being associated with neo-Nazis, to the point where Musk is suing on the theory that it's illegal for people not to give him money. Neutering the utility of the block function served mostly to make harassment and brigading easier. Changing "verified" accounts into paid promotional material nuked the ability of Twitter to serve as a trusted outlet for anyone. 

It's been an utter, unmitigated, arguably unparalleled trainwreck -- and that's why Bluesky was able to overcome the network effect headwinds and establish itself as a competitor. It's not so much "popular discontent can overcome anything," and more "even the biggest ship can sink if its drunken captain insists on ramming it into an iceberg". I don't want to say that's never going to be replicable, but we won't always be so "lucky" as to have someone this incompetent at the helm of our big tech outfits. To take one example, there is plenty of negative things to be said on how Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook as of late, but as bad as his choices have been and as aggravating as Facebook often is as a platform, nothing Facebook has done has come anywhere close to the abyss of incompetence that characterized how Elon Musk ran Twitter into the ground -- and for that reason, we haven't seen a true competitor emerge to Facebook in a manner akin to Bluesky.

So which story is right? I don't know (and of course, it's more of a spectrum than a binary). I do think Bluesky made some smart choices that it deserves credit for -- there's a reason it is the main competitor (and not Threads or Mastodon). But there's little doubt it got a huge assist from the dizzying array of unfathomably boneheaded choices Elon Musk has made at the helm of X -- a unicorn event that to my eyes stands out even amongst a sea of overconfident, underperforming tech bros.