Twitter Vs Bluesky And The Psephosphere

Last year's introduction will do just as well for this one.  It's an almost annual tradition on this site to release something every Christmas Day.  Click the Xmas tag for previous random examples.  Why do I do this?  Partly it's a present for those who like Christmas, which in a very low-key non-religious fashion includes your host, but it's also a present for those who don't want to deal with this particular Christmas or even generally cannot stand Christmas and just wish it was a normal day when normal things happened.  And what could be more normal than niche meta-psephology?  Therefore, the campaign against compulsory Christmasing brings you ... whatever this is.  

As the owner of X, which I still call Twitter, continues to run it into the ground both by making almost invariably bad changes to the website and by generally being himself, interest in alternative microblogging websites has grown.  In June 2023, with Twitter appearing in some danger of permanent technical collapse, I signed up accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads to cater for those fleeing the mothership, and as an insurance in case Twitter died or downgraded its features to a point where I wanted to leave it.  Microblogging sites are very important to my work, both as a place to obtain news about electoral matters but also as a place to make people aware of newly released posts on here (given how irregularly I post them.)

Until recently my activity on Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads has been mostly a secondary service with links to articles on this site posted; sometimes I will crosspost a debunking of some particularly bad poll-shaped object, and usually I will reply to questions when I can.  However this changed in the wake of the 2024 US election, when there was a mass exodus of Twitter users to BlueSky as a result of Elon Musk's active support for the return of Donald Trump.  Over the coming weeks my total Twitter following dropped from about 16900 to 16400 as some of the refugees deleted their Twitter accounts.  At the same time my Bluesky following rose within a week from around 950 to over 2000, even though I was not initially posting that much there, and it has now reached nearly 4000.  Clearly plenty of account holders have become active on Bluesky without deleting Twitter, though some may have stopped posting actively on the latter.

While the crossover rate has slowed, at this stage it's by no means stopped.  Just while I was compiling figures for this article this week, I was amused to see an Australian pol sci academic who is active in psephology tweet a so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish message and within five minutes of doing so delete his X account.  

Once I realised that Bluesky was surging I decided to ramp up activity there to the point that many (not all) of the threads I post on Twitter are now crossposted, sometimes in not exactly identical form depending on context.  I'm interested in tracking how interest levels are going between the two platforms - for the purposes of tweeting about Australian elections and polls, is Twitter really dying off as its users leave for a platform that isn't cursed by the hand of El*n M*sk, or is this a temporary rebellion or a long-term split?  It's too early to be sure where it is going, but this is what I've found so far:

For the purposes of this article I measure engagement on a post as a total of likes, replies and repostings (excluding my own replies). Happily when it comes to Twitter vs Bluesky there has been very little difference in how these three forms of engagement are comparing with each other - at one stage I thought replies were comparatively higher on Bluesky compared to the other forms of engagement, but the full data set I've assembled since early November shows that's no longer the case. 

As background rates, in August engagement on Bluesky for my crossposted items was running at 7.6% of that on Twitter, in September 7.4% and in October just a little higher at 13.5%.  These levels were lower than I had been used to at times in the past when particular technical wobbles or new bad feature introductions on Twitter would sometimes briefly see Bluesky engagement rising to 40-50%, but never for long.  

I didn't actually crosspost anything between 26 Oct and 9 November so the period for which I can compare engagement levels on the two sites post the Trump return starts on 10 November.  Between then and a cutoff for this article of 22 Dec I crossposted at least 105 psephology/politics threads (I think slightly more than that, but there were some I couldn't find by advanced search on Twitter).  Some of these were single posts, some were threads with several posts (usually the lead post in the thread is the highest scorer).  Some days were far more active than others on both sites - for instance on 28 Nov, there were frenetic last day of school activities in both Tasmanian and federal parliaments and I crossposted nine threads in all.  

On some days I didn't crosspost anything, or I only crossposted one thread that didn't get much action, so the day to day results are very bouncy.  I've chosen instead to use the 7-day rolling total as a measure of activity by time.  For instance for 23 November, the 7-day rolling total is all engagements from 20 Nov to 26 Nov.

On this basis I've produced this comparative graph:

Loosely this divides into three phases.  Through to 22 Nov, my engagement figures on Twitter were relatively low and those on Bluesky were seriously close to parity.  From 24 Nov through 11 Dec, engagement on Twitter was very high (because I was so active there and some individual threads were quite high scoring) but the engagement totals on Bluesky were similar to the first phase, now and then higher.  In the back end of December, my engagement totals on Twitter were back to roughly mid-November levels, but those on BlueSky were a lot lower than those levels.

This can also be captured in a single graph which gives the Bluesky to Twitter ratio as a seven-day rolling total based figure:

The engagement level ratio (Bluesky/Twitter) was very close to parity until about 21 Nov then dropped off rapidly and has run at around 45% since the last week of November (ie just over twice as many engagements on Twitter as Bluesky.  

There is some pattern that my low scoring threads on Twitter tend to do better comparatively on Bluesky than the high-scorers.  A thread that gets only 10 engagements on Twitter will on average also get 10 on Bluesky.  This may be partly because a lot of the comparatively better performing threads on Bluesky are Tasmania-specific and these often have fairly low engagement levels on Twitter anyway.  At the high end, only one of my individual posts on Bluesky has made it to 100 likes so far:

The same post on Twitter scored 16-29-225.  

Even this level of comparative engagement is hardly bad going for Bluesky, since my following on Twitter is still over four times larger (though I suspect a hefty portion of the Twitter accounts are long inactive.)  Also, because I need TweetDeck to do my work on Twitter effectively (especially the debunking of poll deniers and first past the post supporters) I am a supposed "verified user" on said site, which may lead to my posts being seen more in users' feeds.  Furthermore in most but not all cases the Twitter version of the post is released seconds or minutes before the Bluesky version.  So others' mileage may vary.  At a quick look at Antony Green's recent crossposted threads he seemed to be getting a similar Bluesky to Twitter engagement ratio to me although his Bluesky following is only a few percent of his Twitter following at this stage.

For the time being, it looks to me that some of the surge to Bluesky in the wake of Trump was ephemeral, but at the same time the site now has enough of a critical mass to remain a significant site for covering psephology themes on, so I will probably maintain the current level of crossposting.  (I also intend to continue some posting on Mastodon, where although my following is very small there usually seems to be some engagement level.  However Threads is so dead lately I am close to suspending activity there.)  What I'm not seeing at the moment is a snowballing acceleration away from Twitter of the sort that seemed possible in the early days of the post-Trump exodus.  Perhaps this will happen over future cycles of the site owner being stupid and offensive or damaging the site's functions further but we don't seem to be close to there yet.

In terms of the atmosphere of the two sites, I've had a minor dilemma as to how to engage with familiar accounts that have behaved poorly on Twitter - usually accounts, mostly of the tribally pro-ALP variety, that have either serially tweeted poll denial material, or blocked me in response to criticism of false claims they have tweeted.  Aside from blocking Van Badham on all of Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads as soon as I signed up to them (in solidarity with the thousands of good posters she has blocked on Twitter) I've mostly taken the attitude that what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter and I will give these accounts a second chance on Bluesky (but with no tolerance at all if they return to their old ways).  I am so far not seeing the same level of antics in my particular areas of interest from the same such accounts on there.  There is a feeling that Bluesky is not yet a space that gets contested with the same level of energy and polarisation, and some of the more obnoxious accounts on Twitter so far behave more sedately in the other place.

Secular season's greetings and Happy New Year to all readers!  Sometime around New Year's Eve I will post my annual review for this site and there's at least one more article in the works that may appear some random time in the next few weeks.