The X is Off-Target

I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t have time to devote to every single social network. I don’t have the energy to post to Threads and Instagram and TikTok. I would much rather post a couple places I know are worth my time and then focus my energy elsewhere.

But if your job is watching the zeitgeist as a blogger like myself presumably might, you may feel like you’ve spent the last couple of years with one hand behind your back. No one network covers the conversation anymore, and if you’re posting about tech or AI, you might feel like you’re missing something important by not being on X.

So in a way, I get the frustration that has Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, and perhaps a few other people, looking at seriously focusing on X again after a few years away. Here’s Gruber’s take:

I see more interesting posts on X than I do on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined. I wish that weren’t so but it is. Most people don’t want to think about politics so they don’t. Those people, when they want to participate in a Twitter-like social network, go to X.

And I can’t blame anyone. The only network that compares to X, size-wise, is Threads — but Threads’s algorithm is weirder than X’s now, and the content I see there is relatively boring. My Threads timeline is full of engagement bait without being engaging. And if you want to judge a platform by its owner, “I’m grossed out and/or appalled by Elon Musk so I’m going to Mark Zuckerberg’s joint” isn’t a way to avoid being grossed out and/or appalled by the owner. Bluesky and Mastodon are too small for most people to care about — and, worse, they are the networks where politics are, in my experience, unavoidable. You can have a discussion about cool new use cases and tools for AI on X and people just discuss the tools and use cases. On Bluesky and Mastodon it’s difficult to have such discussions without arguments from people who (a) believe all use of AI is unethical, and (b) will shove their viewpoints into your replies.

As a guy who also blogs, I sympathize with the perspective that chatter about politics and anti-AI sentiment has perhaps made smaller networks like Bluesky and the fediverse less fun for some curious nerdy tinkerers. If you don’t feel like you can share your excitement about an emerging technology because it breaks a social norm, you might feel like you’re in the wrong spot.

(And it would sure be nice if the famous people didn’t only post on the biggest network.)

But at the same time, just because a social network feels like it’s good in one sense doesn’t mean it’s good in numerous others.

For one thing, I’m going to forever associate the mess that was the Trump administration’s first 90 days, the DOGE of it all, with X. Much of what was happening was publicly highlighted there, and for a time, it felt like X was an appendage of a government that many felt had taken the country in a dangerous direction. Eventually, Musk extricated himself from the federal government, but not without lingering questions about “why.”

But product decisions specifically related to X come with their own awkward discussion points. I can’t imagine Grok’s controversial image-generation capabilities have made people feel universally welcomed, for example. And the downranking of links, while not unique to X and since (thankfully) rolled back, I think presents a very disturbing trend for public discourse. That could happen again at any time.

And for all the weaknesses of Bluesky’s moderation capabilities—anyone who has appeared on a public list that they don’t understand knows what I’m talking about—it is a network that tries to do something to protect its users. X has made it possible for users to appear on your timeline even if you’ve blocked them, or vice versa.

The fact of the matter is, as Anil Dash has frequently emphasized over the years, X is not a welcoming place anymore and in fact comes with more brand harms than brand goods. (Many of the arguments he has made about Substack more or less apply to X. Just because good things happen there doesn’t mean those good things cancel out a platform’s harms.)

We’d probably be happier with smaller, more focused networks

But I think this discussion also opens up another, related question: Do we need to live in a world where every network is the biggest thing ever? Can you have a thriving community without your primary platform being a zeitgeist machine? Gruber’s framing on the issue seems to suggest that Twitter circa 2009 is the ideal. But what if that moment has genuinely passed? The Threads algorithm that Gruber points to specifically goes out of its way to discourage the very kinds of interactions that a 2009 Twitter once allowed. The fediverse’s server-oriented setup favors interactions in smaller communities even if, in practice, people still tend to favor the larger ones.

If anything, the tension that folks see on Bluesky, a network (unfortunately) seeded with people who intentionally quit X, shows how a single network for everyone may be a pipe dream at this point. People need communities that touch on specific areas, but the problem has always been discovery and embrace. Threads attempts to solve that by connecting those latent lines together using algorithmic imperfection. Bluesky tries solving it with the use of starter lists and custom feeds. At this point in its history, X prefers a “let things fall where they may” approach.

I think the problem we have right now is not that all the excitement is happening on bigger networks; it’s that we want smaller, more niche communities, but our options for getting those come with a lot of baggage either technical or cultural. Some people just want to post, no bullshit. Other people don’t want to deal with the bullying and othering that poorly moderated networks carry.

On top of all that, these networks can push you off the path you’ve chosen to focus on. You want to post about tech or weird stuff, but all of a sudden, you’re posting about a guy you didn’t know existed 10 minutes ago. In that sense X is an easier network to enjoy if you want to just passively have a conversation about something, and that it’s easier to keep track of zeitgeist-defining conversations and viral posts.

But at the same time, none of this really takes into the fact that, for all the political chatter that has taken place on Bluesky in the past two years, the real-life effects of each network are by no means comparable. (I struggle to see a political scandal from the fediverse or Bluesky that gets anywhere near what we’ve seen from X in the past two years.) X has made room for interesting discussions about AI that appeal to a certain audience of techies. But there are a lot of people that feel left out by these discussions. They deserve the room to find their own places to converse.

Perhaps we don’t need one large overarching network anymore. Maybe we just need one or two places where we feel comfortable to talk about the things that really appeal to us. (If I were Bluesky, I would actively look for ways to niche in.)

For lots of people, X probably isn’t it. And that’s OK.