Everyone said we were leaving. And for a while, it looked like we did. But the internet’s architecture is more stubborn than we think.
It was the perfect moment. Elon Musk’s X descended further into chaos, turning from a news feed into a battleground of bots, conspiracies, and algorithmic ego trips. Enter Bluesky. Decentralized. Developer-friendly. Weird in the best ways. A digital haven built on principles, not ad revenue.
The headlines followed. So did the first wave of users. Journalists, artists, academics, the politically disenchanted. A digital migration began.
But migration doesn’t always mean arrival. And in 2025, it’s becoming clear: there is no mass exodus in the internet age. Just overlapping habitats. And old powers that are harder to leave behind than we’d like to admit.
Platform exodus is a powerful idea. But mostly, it’s a fantasy.
We love the story. One platform fails, a better one rises. The people speak with their clicks. We all move somewhere new, freer, cleaner, more democratic.
In practice, though, the gravitational force of incumbents is stronger than any scandal. Twitter, now X, still dominates political discourse. Threads has Meta’s machine learning behind it. YouTube remains the video commons. TikTok commands culture. And even when users show up elsewhere, their attention doesn’t always follow.
Bluesky isn’t broken. But it’s not yet a breakout.
What Jay Graber and her team are building is quietly revolutionary. Bluesky isn’t trying to be Twitter 2.0. It’s building a protocol—a foundation that allows multiple apps to coexist in an open social web. Think SMTP for social posts.
That matters. Because the real future of social isn’t a new winner. It’s the end of “winner-take-all” models altogether. Instead of one platform to rule them all, we may have dozens—each tailored to different needs, identities, and moods, but linked through interoperable infrastructure.
Still, Bluesky’s tone right now is specific. Smart, left-leaning, slightly sarcastic. For many, that’s a breath of fresh air. For others, it’s a filter bubble of a different flavor. If the goal is mass adoption, the road is long. And lined with flame wars, moderation dilemmas, and monetization headaches.
Why we don’t really leave – even when we should
There’s another truth too. People don’t just stay on platforms because of habit. They stay because power still lives there.
For journalists, Twitter is still where news breaks. For creators, it’s where their audience still scrolls. For activists, it’s where narratives can still go viral, for better or worse. And until new platforms offer not just freedom, but reach, the cycle repeats.
That’s the bind we’re in. The internet wants to decentralize. But attention still centralizes. And without attention, even the best ideas can fade into digital quiet.
So what now? The slow, strange middle.
We’re in between internet eras. The monopolies haven’t fallen, but they’re cracked. The new players are building, but they haven’t broken through. And users? They’re exhausted. Platform hopping isn’t rebellion anymore, it’s survival. Each move feels less like a revolution, more like a reset button that never really resets anything.
Maybe that’s the new normal. Not a clean break from legacy platforms, but a long negotiation. A phase of fragmented belonging. A web made of subcultures, alt-spaces, private circles, and protocol experiments. A social internet that looks more like a mosaic than a town square.
In that world, Bluesky may never “replace” X. But maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe the win isn’t scale. It’s sovereignty. Control. The right to build smaller, smarter, slower spaces that aren’t defined by what came before.
