From the Red Hell to the Sky of Blue

// It's been an awful week. I don't live in the United States, but I'm close enough that the victory of Donald Trump is going to cast a shadow over my life, the life of my friends and family, and, quite assuredly, over the life of everybody in the world. I'd been deluding myself that the horrorshow (excuse me for turning around the Clockwork Orange Nadsat slang) that began in 2016 would never return—that there was no way over half the electorate in the U.S. would vote for a rapist felon, the living embodiment of self-interest and greed. I couldn't believe they would hand the Most Important Job in the World ™ to the Worst Human in America. (With the exception, I suppose, of your serial killers and school shooters.)

But they did just that. And by a decisive margin. To quote ol' Lou Reed, "Just goes to show how wrong you can be."

In the run-up to the election, I'd been posting a lot on the platform once known as Twitter. I'd come to hate the place. When Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion, I signed off, but I didn't take the definitive step of deleting my account; that would have been satisfying, but it would also have meant the loss of an archive of my thoughts and interactions for over a decade. I moved over to Mastodon, and began to follow people, and to build up a following of my own. It's a good enough platform, but it is clunky, and too often I feel like I'm arguing over shades of correctness with other well-intentioned people, les biens-pensants du monde.

And echo chambers tend to be stultifying; growth comes from being challenged, if it's only figuring out how to communicate with someone who doesn't share your views. That's why I drifted back to Twitter/X. I had a lot of followers there, 42,000 before Musk, which meant a lot of potential to get worthwhile messages out. For example: in Ontario, car-brained premier Doug Ford has recently been threatening to use provincial authority to tear out bike lanes in Toronto and other cities. (I wrote about this shameful scapegoating of cyclists here.) By calling attention to this idiocy—by unashamedly trying to humiliate a short-sighted politician for a demonstrably stupid decision—I could help make millions of people around the world aware of an injustice, and, at best, help bring a stop to it.

But really, I didn't like going on X, even for a few minutes a day. It was a zone of sketchy ads for Crypto and ultimate fighting bouts, and bots, and misogynistic and racist creeps, and the stench of Elon. I'd signed in 2012, when it was a very interesting communication network for connecting with like-minded people, and staying on top of subjects that were close to my heart (especially sustainable and active transportation). In times of crisis, Twitter was also great way of seeing what was happening on the ground, particularly when it became possible to share videos. You could see revolutions happening on the ground, and, with a bit of application, figure out who was documenting them.

We all know what happened then: Twitter was purchased by the world's biggest troll, a man detested in the sustainable transportation world for his naked promotion of his own dangerous cars, spreading motonormativity as a default mode, and, more generally, for his assaults on democracy, decency, and his entanglements with Trump and Putin and other authoritarians. When I did venture on to X/Twitter, I was like somebody trying to rescue a few precious belongings from an irradiated home in the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion. It felt like every minute spent there was, in a small but measurable way, detracting from my long-term well-being.

For a while, though, and especially in the run up to November 5, X seemed like a place where, in spite of the toxicity, messages of hope, protest, and change could be amplified and spread. Just do your posting, I told myself, then get out. And whatever you do, don't engage with the Morlocks, Sleestacks, and Daleks (I date myself with my sci-fi boogeyman references!) lurking everywhere. Most of them aren't even human, so, if you take the bait, you'll probably be wrestling with an algorithm.

And, after a couple of days of post-election disbelief (part of me was hoping Trump's next stop would be jail, or exile in Venezuela), I woke up saying to myself: I better detach for a while, for my own sanity. I felt a strong aversion to the news, and, most of all X/Twitter. It turns out I wasn't alone. When I idly tapped on the Instagram icon, I saw a lot of people were posting about deleting their X accounts. (Of course, most of the people on Mastodon had done that long ago.) Two days after the election, I tapped another icon on my phone, that long-neglected blue one with a butterfly on it. To my surprise, there had been lots of activity in my absence, and, without even posting, I seemed to have few hundred followers.

I'd been invited onto Bluesky by another transportation/urbanism writer back in August 2023. I signed up, but found the site less than stimulating. At the time, there were a lot of people posting photos of bagels and sandwiches. You couldn't upload videos, something that made X and Mastodon feel more immediate and informative. I couldn't find many of my friends, leading voices on issues I cared about, or legacy media outlets. Not that there was anything wrong with the way the platform worked; it just didn't seem very useful.

All that changed this week. My feeling of disgust with X was obviously shared by many—in fact, in something that has become known as the "Xodus," users have migrated en masse to Bluesky; the platform is currently heading towards 20 million users. (X claims to have 50 million active users in the US, but many commentators believe these figures are grossly inflated.) Media outlets and their commentators are making the switch, too; The Guardian announced it was leaving X for Bluesky, citing "toxicity." As my follower count plummets on X, it is simultaneously rising on Bluesky.

So far, the Blue place seems...nice. Because, first and foremost, there are no ads; you have to do a lot of scrolling on the Hellsite (as Mastodon users refer to it) before you get to anything resembling content. I like the way it's decentralized and open source, how the data is shared on Personal Data Servers distributed around the world; I shuddered at the thought of X being able to oversee, study, and even control everything I typed or posted. I recognize many of the names that I valued from the early days of Twitter; reconnecting with them feels like a reunion. Bluesky is X before Elon, the bots, and the trolls. Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, was also behind Bluesky, but he has since left the board. (In doing so, he emitted an endorsement of X and Musk, so good riddance to him.) It's a relief not to be contributing to Elon's toxic wasteland, which profits from people's attention—those tens of millions of eyes on screens at the gym, in bedrooms, and, God help us, behind the wheels of his cars—while simultaneously diminishing their ability to pay attention to worthwhile things in the real world.

It's also been easy to reconnect thanks to Bluesky's starter pack feature. You can create a list of accounts you subscribe to, up to 150, and then share them with your followers. It's an easy and organic way to amplify worthy or interesting voices. As other people do the same, a kind of neural network forms. As I posted in the thick of this, it's like watching a brain reconstitute itself after a severe head trauma incident—Musk and the US election—neurons binding to neurons.

I don't know how long my honeymoon with Bluesky will last. The whole Blue-butterfly icon, in opposition to the Red Hell of X, is a little too on the nose; I've become suspicious of having any faith in platforms, which, as we've seen, are all too corruptible. I was enthusiastic about Substack too, until its tolerance for Nazis and white supremacists became clear, and I decided I couldn't be published by a leading publisher (albeit a deliberately negligent one) of hate and division. (That's the reason you're reading this on Ghost—more on that decision here.)

But I'm liking what I'm seeing so far. The critical mass of sign-ups, and the fact that you can post videos, makes Bluesky truly useful. There's less of the preaching-to-the-choir feeling I have at Mastodon, and it's refreshing not to have to hold my breath, like I had to do at the Chernobyl-site.

We'll see. The best platform, of course, is the one that you establish and maintain in real life—with old friends and new friends; with family and people in your neighborhood; or at school, or at work. Those are the relationships that are real, and tend to last. (That said, some of my most valued connections began through the intermediary of social media, via DMs, emails, then texts, then conversations or face-to-face meetings...) For now, I'm giving Bluesky a chance. If you're curious, you can follow me here, or check out this Starter Pack, as well as this one, for my suggestions of people worth checking out.

I'll return to my regular Straphanger dispatch next week; I'm working on a big one, which requires some interviews, apologies for the delay.