The Main Advantage Bluesky Has Over Twitter (Besides The Obvious One)

Well, it happened again. Elon Musk announced a big new change coming to Twitter (now X, to a small amount of people), and everyone said they were fleeing to Bluesky, which seems to have emerged as the main Twitter alternative even if Meta instantly made Threads larger in scale thanks to its Instagram and Facebook integrations.

The change this time is what is happening to the block feature, in which blocked users will now still be able to see your posts, but simply not be able to interact with them. This is again being positioned as some sort of “freedom of speech” thing.

This essentially accomplishes nothing except making it easier to enable harassment or annoyance from users that have been blocked. Even if they cannot interact with your posts directly, they can interact with your followers or other commenters they can now see, and also can easily screenshot your posts and post those on their page. Yes, it’s true that these users can already make alternate accounts, but this streamlines that whole process for them. People who are frequently blocked, often for good reason, are the ones who directly benefit from this.

So, another exodus of users fleeing to Bluesky, and it resulted in a surge of half a million users joining the service in a day, and over a million by now, I believe. This is after 2 million joined when Elon got Twitter banned in Brazil (which has now been reversed). But I am well aware this has happened many times, where Elon makes some bad site change, everyone says they’re leaving for Bluesky, but overwhelmingly, they stay. This happens every few months, it seems like.

But heading over there myself (not abandoning Twitter, just adjacent to it) I have noticed something really interesting there. Yes, obviously a big difference is that this site is just…normal, not run by Elon and with a less hostile userbase overall. But the main thing I’ve noticed as someone really exhausted by the prospect of attempting to build up an audience akin to my 180,000 Twitter followership which took me 14 years to assemble, I may not need to get anywhere close to that to get the same result.

There are two things that are happening here. The first is that there is no elaborate algorithm that hides your posts from followers consistently. Especially in my case, I can post links to my articles freely where they get more reach than the link-averse Twitter, which does not want to direct people away from the site.

Second, I only have 5,000 followers on Bluesky, compared to those 180,000 on Twitter. That is exactly 2.7% the size of my main platform. But posting on Bluesky has revealed that my interactions and engagement there are not all that wildly different than on Twitter. Sometimes, in fact, they get more interaction because of A) the lack of a punishing algorithm and B) more engaged users who frequent the site more than Twitter because well, Twitter is bad now. Tweets I make that get several hundred likes on Twitter may get close or the same on Bluesky. Article links, generally, have gotten more likes and comments.

Right now it is hard to go “go viral” on Bluesky, and I have not had thousand-like posts or anything at this point. Though again, we are talking about an audience 2.7% the size of my Twitter one, and even half the engagement would be extremely impressive based on that alone.

I always try to commit to Bluesky or Threads or whatever alternative, at least through cross-posting, whenever Twitter does something bad. But eventually I fall off. Though given the state of the site now, I may actually give it a real shot this time. So, follow me on Bluesky.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Hero killer series and The Earthborn Trilogy.