Do these efforts to create an alternative to Twitter (X)--Threads, Truth Social, Mastadon--fail because the most active users enjoy conflict and get bored when there's no back and forth? I recall Ann Coulter saying that, but she loves to argue with people, while I do not. Everyone I follow on X is right-leaning and I rarely read the responses (which generally aren't very good), so I choose not to experience the conflict. BTW, if I saw thought-provoking responses from the progressive point of view I would appreciate that, but they almost always sound uninformed, crazy, or childishly partisan to me.
If you like cat pictures, Bluesky is the place for you. There also seems to be an odd fascination with pictures of the galaxy and little "you are here" identifiers. It's pretty lame.
I took a look at Bluesky to see what all the fuss was about. It's mainly cat pictures, with very little content of interest. I think Elon's investment in X/Twitter is safe.
Yeah, I'm a pretty open-minded guy, but my reaction to thumbing through Blue Sky posters is "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, but I'm glad you guys are happy together."
I prefer Substack and blogs. Twitter/X and its doppelganger BlueSky are fine as far as it goes, but the format tends to be dominated by short attention span types (limits to number of characters per tweet, etc.). Similar to how TikTok (very short length videos) now seems to dominate the video website space, with both Facebook and YouTube fielding their own copycat versions ('Reels" and "Shorts"). It's the mass communication version of going to Las Vegas (or any state that now has legal gambling), and pushing the slot machine button to watch the brilliantly lit, pretty pictures whirl and stop.
I got on X in the lead-up to the 2024 general as I figured it would be good entertainment. I quickly started worrying that, like with my nasty crack habit, I was getting hooked.
As it turns out, despite my best efforts to behave myself, I got banned for some unstated reason. (Hunch: one of my last posts was asking if the @ADL was actually the ones responsible for sending out those "Report for slavery detail!" text messages purportedly getting sent to black people after Trump's election victory.)
Anyway, I was quite pleased to be forced off the platform. Like being denied access to crack, I fail to see the downside.
Edit: Yes, I'm joking about the crack. Crystal meth however...
I think I mentioned this under one of Steve's posts over at Unz one time. Fortunately for me, I seem to have been blessed with mental genetics that are somewhat immune to addictive things. My grandfather, who smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes for 40 years, quit cold turkey when he was 50 because he suddenly got annoyed by my grandmother complaining about emptying the ashtray every week. Similarly, as a young man when they had three young children to raise (my Mother was 5), Mom told the story about how Grandma confronted Granddad one night after coming home from a bender with the boys that it was time to choose between his family and the booze. He never touched another drop.
Point is, I feel no desire to get an X account, or spend wasted time gambling, or taking up addictive substances (though I have experienced all of these). I guess my addiction is obsessively reading and learning a myriad of topics; living where I am in the middle of the Eastern theater of the Civil War, I've spent the last 25 years walking battlefields and reading much on the military aspects of the conflict to become somewhat of an amateur historian, though I don't write about it since just about every angle has been obsessively covered by generations before me who devoted professional lives to it.
I'm ok with having an addiction/obsession with Civil War history, though my wife finds it funny/curious/silly most of the time, lol.
I like that I can learn things on X. Last weekend I learned a historical tidbit about the Edmund Fitzgerald I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Giving up Facebook four years ago was the best thing, on the other hand. And I wasn’t even addicted in any sense. Didn’t realize how much it was bringing me down; I’m smart enough to know that everyone posting their fake happiness is fake… but it was still undermining.
“The lake it is said never gives up it’s dead”… the water is so cold in the Great Lakes, particularly in Superior, that you sink to the bottom for good because the water is so cold. Apparently it needs to be warmer for you to float back up. I had no idea; I thought it was just a catchy lyric. Technically not about the ship, but still something learned.
There's some decent literature on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I am quite sure that the Edmund Fitzgerald ran too close to some shoals near the Canadian coast, a large gash opened up and allowed water into the compartments filled with taconite pellets. The Edmund Fitzgerald began to list and went down bow-down coming off a wave.
I prefer videos to be length appropriate to the content. I think YouTube contributed to the rise of TikTok by incentivizing creators to make videos longer than ten minutes, to have a click bait title, and then not get to the point until the video was almost over.
The funny thing about "video content" is how poor it is at its stated goal of conveying information in any kind of efficient manner.
The "content" in a fifteen-minute video can usually be conveyed in text by a competent writer in a few hundred words, which could take 1-2 minutes to read. The reading skill of skimming can be used as needed, knocking it down even further. Trying to "skim" a video often doesn't work. With reading there are also no ads interrupting you or disruptions causing buffering and internet-connection problems.
Another serious problem is that the type of personality attracted to "creating content" is NOT usually a particularly good thinker in the way a good columnist of old would be. So besides the problems with info-density you have the problem of content-reliability. Youtube streamers are often the class-clowns and smart-alecs who don't necessarily offer reliable info or opinions on things. In other words, something other than knowledge or reliability or thoughtfulness tends to be rewarded on Youtube. It's easy to see this in just the vibes given off by the most-successful "streamers."
There are people out there watching Youtube and such tens of hours a week. If completely cutting off Youtube and instead reading books or long-form magazine-style articles, could consume better-quality info and more info overall by many times over. Only occasionally does video add much, IMO. It's simply the convenient place to put what could be all-audio material or even all-text material.
What Youtube evolved to be was to create videos that not only flout this idea of video's inherent inefficiency, but deliberately delay the delivery of their info even further. It's all useless. The 1980s/1990s word "infotainment" comes to mind here.
Many of the same criticisms apply to podcasts as well, a form that also tends to be highly inefficient at actually delivering core info and rewards the chatty over the knowledgeable or those who can make points in a direct way. Many podcasts are more fluff than content, and even with the content portion the same disclaimer applies about info-density.
This system (Youtube, etc. video-content consumption) is selling something that, if seen at arm's length and subject to a basic medium-is-the-message analysis, looks and feels very much like something that sci-fi would have come up with for a enstupidified future world (TikTok moreso). Orwell was one of the earlier people to foresee with his always-on Big Brother television-sets.
1. Instruction: Many concepts are better explained with moving pictures. A recreation of an ancient battle, how to replace the anode rod on your water heater, what a wave function looks like in complex space, oh and an especially cool one that explained how to derive the Fourier transform. A motivated nerd had learning opportunities these days way beyond textbooks (if I could even have acquired them before college).
2. Once search was broken by people going the algorithm, a detailed YouTube video was enough of a time investment for the author, you could have slightly more confidence in reviews. If you do a text search for reviews of that new high end speaker, the first page of results will be places that sell speakers. Most of the reviews will be clearly generate by AI to praise whatever you are looking at. A detailed video review shows someone who is interested who really took the time to listen to the speaker and give his opinion.
3. Some times an opinion video has helpful video examples. If the guy's opinion is that a guy with a spear beats a guy with a sword, the text version would be "Spear longer, duh" but the video can show two dedicated maniacs testing it out with spears and swords (and probably costumes)
But yeah for a lot of things, like explaining how a study about mRNA vaccines showed that they turn a significant fraction of people into minor demons, much more efficient to read the text of the original paper and/or another text critiquing the statistical methods and definitions of demon and minor
I hope to see BS (love that!) succeed. Why? By reinforcing their “values” and mindset among their own, it will give them the strength to double down on issues that they lose the majority on. They will genuinely be flummoxed- just like in the recent election- when they lose over something they were convinced they were going to win… because everyone around them agreed with them. It really is that easy to accomplish with them.
The “jerks and geniuses” was a bit harsh, Steve…. but happy to be amongst them:)
It will not succeed though, because even heads of state post on Twitter. (Which I won't call X.) Blue Sky is too local, focused only on the Left and only on the U.S., the only color where blue has come to mean right-wing. It's just like TruthSocial (which is what you get when a boomer names social media), which doesn't fly either.
(Why blue is Left and red is Right in the U.S.: Media election maps used various colors on election night in the past, and in 2000 CNN happened to use blue for the Democrats and red for the Republicans. They couldn't admit that Al Gore lost because Clinton's policies were unpopular, so they ran hard with the explanation that there are simply "blue states" and "red states" and Clinton could not be blamed.)
> They couldn't admit that Al Gore lost because Clinton's policies were unpopular, so they ran hard with the explanation that there are simply "blue states" and "red states" and Clinton could not be blamed
This is a laughable interpretation of events on your part; Al Gore dug his own grave, even though I voted for him
It’s a pretty standard narrative though, is there any mention of “red” or “blue” states prior to 2000? I’ve always been told the election map loomed large over the nation during the whole recount drama and that’s when the “red” “blue” state lingo began to get adopted. I was too young to remember any prior elections so I’m just genuinely curious about where these terms come from
Tell was correct that red and blue became identified with those parties because of the 2000 election. However, I don't accept his claim that Gore's loss was considered a fait accompli because the red states were unwinnable; after all John Kerry was able to flip New Hampshire blue in 2004. In fact it was the 2004 map makes the red/blue dichotomy stark as there were no red or blue islands in the coterminous 48.
I'd just point out you're probably one of the best-known conservative intellectuals around, and guys like David Brooks and Ross Douthat used to pinch your stuff without attribution. So you may be seeing a different side of the platform than most people.
FWIW, I grew up watching Mel Brooks movies and Jackie Mason, so New York sounds fine by me. (Though I suspect you are not so sanguine, as I believe New York is LA's old archrival.)
Because most times I see the name without a capital letter “S,” and because I’m a reader before a speaker and thus prone to mispronounce words, I long thought the site was pronounced Blueski (rhymes with brewski). I kind of like that pronunciation because it gives it a Slavic Commie feel
So the average Blue Sky poster is a white 63-year old cat woman, divorced, wears her hair chopped, never wears dresses or skirts, drives a mid-sized foreign car, is a vegetarian, sips Chardonnay and reads Toni Morrison novels because Oprah told her to do so.
I saw a screenshot from Blue Sky Safety that they were getting a deluge of users reporting other posters for 'harmful' content. Obviously a lot of shrill people moved from X to the new Blue Sky and the latter is far more likely to engage in the kind of throttling of content like pre-Musk Twitter did. So it's basically a safe space for orthodox lefties but probably not particularly dynamic.
Most of the time I see Twitter through a list of just 16 accounts, but I still experience it as a busy, tumultuous place. Not only are those accounts very different from each other, each interacts with users representing a wide variety of interests and viewpoints. So the environment is dense with surprising and sometimes challenging ideas, and there's always an excitement to it. I also see good stuff on BlueSky, but since everyone is on the same page about so many things I always have a pretty good idea of what to expect. That creates a quieter feeling.
On Twitter, I'm alert and waiting to see what will come next. So each tweet is more interesting than it would be in a more sedate setting like BlueSky. Many of the 16 members of my Twitter Short List repost all of their tweets on BlueSky, but a joke that would make me laugh out loud if I saw it on Twitter only makes me smile there, and an observation or argument that would get me thinking hard if I saw it on Twitter elicits at most a respectful nod of agreement or a mildly skeptical shake of the head. It's like the difference between a real party and a reception at work. I've had pleasant experiences during receptions at work, but they are no substitute for a freewheeling get-together.
I never got on Rumble or Telegram or any of the other right-wing alternatives to the pre-Musk Twitter; I didn't feel I had to, because the right of center posters I enjoy never stopped tweeting. I signed up for BlueSky because several of my left of center favorites can now be found only there. I don't know if Rumble, Telegram, etc had the same thin atmosphere as BlueSky, but I am sure that if all the lefties depart Twitter the site will be far less stimulating than it is now.
Twitter is great for citizen journalism. You can catch a story before it blows up and see stories that never blow up. OTOH I have to admit that most of what is posted I don't understand. There is some kind of cryptic Twitterspeak perhaps that requires a large amount of context to get most of the gags.
So, BS is the Midwit meme?
Do these efforts to create an alternative to Twitter (X)--Threads, Truth Social, Mastadon--fail because the most active users enjoy conflict and get bored when there's no back and forth? I recall Ann Coulter saying that, but she loves to argue with people, while I do not. Everyone I follow on X is right-leaning and I rarely read the responses (which generally aren't very good), so I choose not to experience the conflict. BTW, if I saw thought-provoking responses from the progressive point of view I would appreciate that, but they almost always sound uninformed, crazy, or childishly partisan to me.
If you like cat pictures, Bluesky is the place for you. There also seems to be an odd fascination with pictures of the galaxy and little "you are here" identifiers. It's pretty lame.
Yes, and they are also practically US-only. International users won't go there. This also affects US users as they don't want to be in a small forum.
I took a look at Bluesky to see what all the fuss was about. It's mainly cat pictures, with very little content of interest. I think Elon's investment in X/Twitter is safe.
Supposedly their userbase has surpassed X/Twitter.
Probably not, at least not yet.
Sure. Let's go with that.
I think that was Threads (Meta) that BS passed.
Hilariously accurate appraisal.
Yeah, I'm a pretty open-minded guy, but my reaction to thumbing through Blue Sky posters is "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, but I'm glad you guys are happy together."
That was my first feeling as well, but Twitter used to be the one of the main platforms of attack for the left to launch cancellation attacks.
So--I can't be too sanguine.
They’re planning to do it now from BlueSky I think
I would find that quite credible--do you have a link?
I prefer Substack and blogs. Twitter/X and its doppelganger BlueSky are fine as far as it goes, but the format tends to be dominated by short attention span types (limits to number of characters per tweet, etc.). Similar to how TikTok (very short length videos) now seems to dominate the video website space, with both Facebook and YouTube fielding their own copycat versions ('Reels" and "Shorts"). It's the mass communication version of going to Las Vegas (or any state that now has legal gambling), and pushing the slot machine button to watch the brilliantly lit, pretty pictures whirl and stop.
I got on X in the lead-up to the 2024 general as I figured it would be good entertainment. I quickly started worrying that, like with my nasty crack habit, I was getting hooked.
As it turns out, despite my best efforts to behave myself, I got banned for some unstated reason. (Hunch: one of my last posts was asking if the @ADL was actually the ones responsible for sending out those "Report for slavery detail!" text messages purportedly getting sent to black people after Trump's election victory.)
Anyway, I was quite pleased to be forced off the platform. Like being denied access to crack, I fail to see the downside.
Edit: Yes, I'm joking about the crack. Crystal meth however...
It's almost as if crack were bad.
Almost.
I think I mentioned this under one of Steve's posts over at Unz one time. Fortunately for me, I seem to have been blessed with mental genetics that are somewhat immune to addictive things. My grandfather, who smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes for 40 years, quit cold turkey when he was 50 because he suddenly got annoyed by my grandmother complaining about emptying the ashtray every week. Similarly, as a young man when they had three young children to raise (my Mother was 5), Mom told the story about how Grandma confronted Granddad one night after coming home from a bender with the boys that it was time to choose between his family and the booze. He never touched another drop.
Point is, I feel no desire to get an X account, or spend wasted time gambling, or taking up addictive substances (though I have experienced all of these). I guess my addiction is obsessively reading and learning a myriad of topics; living where I am in the middle of the Eastern theater of the Civil War, I've spent the last 25 years walking battlefields and reading much on the military aspects of the conflict to become somewhat of an amateur historian, though I don't write about it since just about every angle has been obsessively covered by generations before me who devoted professional lives to it.
I'm ok with having an addiction/obsession with Civil War history, though my wife finds it funny/curious/silly most of the time, lol.
I like that I can learn things on X. Last weekend I learned a historical tidbit about the Edmund Fitzgerald I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Giving up Facebook four years ago was the best thing, on the other hand. And I wasn’t even addicted in any sense. Didn’t realize how much it was bringing me down; I’m smart enough to know that everyone posting their fake happiness is fake… but it was still undermining.
What new fact about the Edmund Fitzgerald did you find out? I am fascinated by the tragedy.
“The lake it is said never gives up it’s dead”… the water is so cold in the Great Lakes, particularly in Superior, that you sink to the bottom for good because the water is so cold. Apparently it needs to be warmer for you to float back up. I had no idea; I thought it was just a catchy lyric. Technically not about the ship, but still something learned.
There's some decent literature on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I am quite sure that the Edmund Fitzgerald ran too close to some shoals near the Canadian coast, a large gash opened up and allowed water into the compartments filled with taconite pellets. The Edmund Fitzgerald began to list and went down bow-down coming off a wave.
What's your favorite battle and why? Lots of dandies to choose from in VA/PA/MD region.
I find Antietam the most compelling because of the potential and lost opportunity by McClellan (mostly due to his own failings).
I find Antietam compelling in that I took my future wife there on our sixth or seventh date way back in the last century.
BlueSky is to X as Atlantic City is to Vegas.
I prefer videos to be length appropriate to the content. I think YouTube contributed to the rise of TikTok by incentivizing creators to make videos longer than ten minutes, to have a click bait title, and then not get to the point until the video was almost over.
The funny thing about "video content" is how poor it is at its stated goal of conveying information in any kind of efficient manner.
The "content" in a fifteen-minute video can usually be conveyed in text by a competent writer in a few hundred words, which could take 1-2 minutes to read. The reading skill of skimming can be used as needed, knocking it down even further. Trying to "skim" a video often doesn't work. With reading there are also no ads interrupting you or disruptions causing buffering and internet-connection problems.
Another serious problem is that the type of personality attracted to "creating content" is NOT usually a particularly good thinker in the way a good columnist of old would be. So besides the problems with info-density you have the problem of content-reliability. Youtube streamers are often the class-clowns and smart-alecs who don't necessarily offer reliable info or opinions on things. In other words, something other than knowledge or reliability or thoughtfulness tends to be rewarded on Youtube. It's easy to see this in just the vibes given off by the most-successful "streamers."
There are people out there watching Youtube and such tens of hours a week. If completely cutting off Youtube and instead reading books or long-form magazine-style articles, could consume better-quality info and more info overall by many times over. Only occasionally does video add much, IMO. It's simply the convenient place to put what could be all-audio material or even all-text material.
What Youtube evolved to be was to create videos that not only flout this idea of video's inherent inefficiency, but deliberately delay the delivery of their info even further. It's all useless. The 1980s/1990s word "infotainment" comes to mind here.
Many of the same criticisms apply to podcasts as well, a form that also tends to be highly inefficient at actually delivering core info and rewards the chatty over the knowledgeable or those who can make points in a direct way. Many podcasts are more fluff than content, and even with the content portion the same disclaimer applies about info-density.
This system (Youtube, etc. video-content consumption) is selling something that, if seen at arm's length and subject to a basic medium-is-the-message analysis, looks and feels very much like something that sci-fi would have come up with for a enstupidified future world (TikTok moreso). Orwell was one of the earlier people to foresee with his always-on Big Brother television-sets.
All good points.
Some advantages of YouTube videos:
1. Instruction: Many concepts are better explained with moving pictures. A recreation of an ancient battle, how to replace the anode rod on your water heater, what a wave function looks like in complex space, oh and an especially cool one that explained how to derive the Fourier transform. A motivated nerd had learning opportunities these days way beyond textbooks (if I could even have acquired them before college).
2. Once search was broken by people going the algorithm, a detailed YouTube video was enough of a time investment for the author, you could have slightly more confidence in reviews. If you do a text search for reviews of that new high end speaker, the first page of results will be places that sell speakers. Most of the reviews will be clearly generate by AI to praise whatever you are looking at. A detailed video review shows someone who is interested who really took the time to listen to the speaker and give his opinion.
3. Some times an opinion video has helpful video examples. If the guy's opinion is that a guy with a spear beats a guy with a sword, the text version would be "Spear longer, duh" but the video can show two dedicated maniacs testing it out with spears and swords (and probably costumes)
But yeah for a lot of things, like explaining how a study about mRNA vaccines showed that they turn a significant fraction of people into minor demons, much more efficient to read the text of the original paper and/or another text critiquing the statistical methods and definitions of demon and minor
While I wish i could claim it as a conscious choice, my total avoidance of social media has greatly enriched my life.
I hope to see BS (love that!) succeed. Why? By reinforcing their “values” and mindset among their own, it will give them the strength to double down on issues that they lose the majority on. They will genuinely be flummoxed- just like in the recent election- when they lose over something they were convinced they were going to win… because everyone around them agreed with them. It really is that easy to accomplish with them.
The “jerks and geniuses” was a bit harsh, Steve…. but happy to be amongst them:)
It will not succeed though, because even heads of state post on Twitter. (Which I won't call X.) Blue Sky is too local, focused only on the Left and only on the U.S., the only color where blue has come to mean right-wing. It's just like TruthSocial (which is what you get when a boomer names social media), which doesn't fly either.
(Why blue is Left and red is Right in the U.S.: Media election maps used various colors on election night in the past, and in 2000 CNN happened to use blue for the Democrats and red for the Republicans. They couldn't admit that Al Gore lost because Clinton's policies were unpopular, so they ran hard with the explanation that there are simply "blue states" and "red states" and Clinton could not be blamed.)
> They couldn't admit that Al Gore lost because Clinton's policies were unpopular, so they ran hard with the explanation that there are simply "blue states" and "red states" and Clinton could not be blamed
This is a laughable interpretation of events on your part; Al Gore dug his own grave, even though I voted for him
It’s a pretty standard narrative though, is there any mention of “red” or “blue” states prior to 2000? I’ve always been told the election map loomed large over the nation during the whole recount drama and that’s when the “red” “blue” state lingo began to get adopted. I was too young to remember any prior elections so I’m just genuinely curious about where these terms come from
Tell was correct that red and blue became identified with those parties because of the 2000 election. However, I don't accept his claim that Gore's loss was considered a fait accompli because the red states were unwinnable; after all John Kerry was able to flip New Hampshire blue in 2004. In fact it was the 2004 map makes the red/blue dichotomy stark as there were no red or blue islands in the coterminous 48.
I'd just point out you're probably one of the best-known conservative intellectuals around, and guys like David Brooks and Ross Douthat used to pinch your stuff without attribution. So you may be seeing a different side of the platform than most people.
FWIW, I grew up watching Mel Brooks movies and Jackie Mason, so New York sounds fine by me. (Though I suspect you are not so sanguine, as I believe New York is LA's old archrival.)
In my maturity, I'm a big New York City fan, although, as you point out, that wasn't true in 1978.
Because most times I see the name without a capital letter “S,” and because I’m a reader before a speaker and thus prone to mispronounce words, I long thought the site was pronounced Blueski (rhymes with brewski). I kind of like that pronunciation because it gives it a Slavic Commie feel
That's a good name for a BlueSky user.
So the average Blue Sky poster is a white 63-year old cat woman, divorced, wears her hair chopped, never wears dresses or skirts, drives a mid-sized foreign car, is a vegetarian, sips Chardonnay and reads Toni Morrison novels because Oprah told her to do so.
See how much easier it is to say "the average Blueski" instead of "the average Blue Sky poster".
When I think Blue Sky, I think The Allman Brothers. But I'm pretty old.
For convenience, since I looked it up, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHcgmiQwEts .
She looking for a boyfriend...?
I saw a screenshot from Blue Sky Safety that they were getting a deluge of users reporting other posters for 'harmful' content. Obviously a lot of shrill people moved from X to the new Blue Sky and the latter is far more likely to engage in the kind of throttling of content like pre-Musk Twitter did. So it's basically a safe space for orthodox lefties but probably not particularly dynamic.
Classic echo chamber.
Bluesky got its logo from the butterfly all their users have on their asscheek…
BlueSky has promised the same censorship that Twitter used to have. This is the big selling point for many of its users.
So many joined up that BlueSky cannot keep up with all the censorship requests. No doubt it will catch up eventually.
Most of the time I see Twitter through a list of just 16 accounts, but I still experience it as a busy, tumultuous place. Not only are those accounts very different from each other, each interacts with users representing a wide variety of interests and viewpoints. So the environment is dense with surprising and sometimes challenging ideas, and there's always an excitement to it. I also see good stuff on BlueSky, but since everyone is on the same page about so many things I always have a pretty good idea of what to expect. That creates a quieter feeling.
On Twitter, I'm alert and waiting to see what will come next. So each tweet is more interesting than it would be in a more sedate setting like BlueSky. Many of the 16 members of my Twitter Short List repost all of their tweets on BlueSky, but a joke that would make me laugh out loud if I saw it on Twitter only makes me smile there, and an observation or argument that would get me thinking hard if I saw it on Twitter elicits at most a respectful nod of agreement or a mildly skeptical shake of the head. It's like the difference between a real party and a reception at work. I've had pleasant experiences during receptions at work, but they are no substitute for a freewheeling get-together.
I never got on Rumble or Telegram or any of the other right-wing alternatives to the pre-Musk Twitter; I didn't feel I had to, because the right of center posters I enjoy never stopped tweeting. I signed up for BlueSky because several of my left of center favorites can now be found only there. I don't know if Rumble, Telegram, etc had the same thin atmosphere as BlueSky, but I am sure that if all the lefties depart Twitter the site will be far less stimulating than it is now.
Rumble was/is an alternative to YouTube, not Twitter, and you don't "get on" it unless you produce videos.
Twitter is great for citizen journalism. You can catch a story before it blows up and see stories that never blow up. OTOH I have to admit that most of what is posted I don't understand. There is some kind of cryptic Twitterspeak perhaps that requires a large amount of context to get most of the gags.
How are the Twitter/X users going to "Own The Libs", when there are no more libs to own?