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.