I’ve been a loyal Twitter user on @JoshuaKGoldberg since 2014. Twitter has been a huge part of my career success, enabling me to connect with other folks in the web ecosystem, learn from them, and share my areas of work. I wouldn’t be where I am today as an independent open source maintainer without Twitter.
But, Twitter -now X- has been in a consistent downward spiral since Elon Musk bought it in October 2022. The accounts of people I professionally benefit from interacting with have steadily decreased in activity or moved to other platforms: first Mastodon, then Bluesky.
Starting in January 2025, I’m going to stop most of my posting on X. I’ll still post announcements and links for the projects I maintain and my personal blog, but each will have a link to the equivalent Bluesky and Mastodon posts. For discussions around technology, personal thoughts, and other non-essential content, I’ll skip posting to X.
A History of Tweeting
I’m not an exceptionally important person, or really relevant at all outside of the web development tooling niche. This blog post is not some ground-shaking announcement. But I am a known open source maintainer when it comes to web development tooling and TypeScript static analysis in particular.
My understanding of web development tooling is directly informed by conversations with and posts by my peers online. In turn, I’m able to share my work and learnings online with the rest of the industry. I post announcements for projects I work on and collect feedback on them in public. Social media platforms are an integral part of my open source work.
I’ve been cross-posting all my threads across Twitter/X to fosstodon.org/@JoshuaKGoldberg since 2022 and bsky.app/profile/joshuakgoldberg.com since 2023. I’ve needed to because each has an overlapping set of the people I need to reach and be reached by.
The Trouble with Twitter (X)
Twitter used to be a common watering hole for all sorts of communities, including the web development circles I work in. It wasn’t perfect -there was still spam and trolling, like any popular internet space- but most of those communities spent years trying to make their spaces safe and welcoming to all. Elon Musk’s leadership has steadily eroded those efforts to the point where X is a dark shadow of what Twitter used to be.
Here are some of the high-level destructive changes taken over the last two years:
- Renaming from the beloved, well-known “Twitter” to the confusing, obnoxious “X”
- Allowing disinformation for critical topics such as COVID-19: and even encouraging or spreading it from Musk’s account
- Bumbling the Verification feature: removing the notability of real Verified accounts and turning the platform into a pay-to-play mess
- Changing the Blocks feature so blocked users can see posts on profiles: making it much easier to harass and stalk on the platform
- Laying off a majority of the company: severely hampering its ability to maintain platform stability, work on essentials such as accessibility for new features, or moderate its content
- Moving most of the API behind a paywall: destroying most of the platform’s ecosystem
Elon Musk is a homophobic, misogynistic, self-centered jackass. He actively spreads abhorrent and harmful disinformation. A platform’s culture is directly impacted by -and often becomes a reflection of- the top-down direction and tone of its leadership. It is deeply, deeply bad for a public platform to be bound to a person like Elon Musk.
I’ve wanted to decrease my X activity for a long time, but didn’t feel enough of the community had moved off X for that to not harm my career and projects.
Naming Nuance
Like many longtime users, I spent most of 2023 and 2024 refusing to call Twitter “X”. It’s a horrifically confusing rename and a downgrade.
But at this point, X really is a different platform from Twitter. Twitter is gone. It’s just X now.
Calling X “X” helps differentiate the spam-ridden monstrosity we see today from the Twitter of ages past.
The Muddle of Mastodon
🎙️ I had the pleasure of interviewing Mastodon’s creator, Eugen Rochko, on Software Engineering Daily earlier this year.
Mastodon was the first major alternative to Twitter/X that the community tried out following Musk’s 2022 takeover. Mastodon presents a theologically beautiful alternative to centralized platforms like Instagram and X. Instead of giving control to a single company, Mastodon inherently forces communities to be decentralized and resilient to corporate takeovers.
I wanted to love Mastodon. I really, really did. Mastodon is a wonderful piece of engineering.
But I think Mastodon is a case study of principles over practicality.
Mastodon’s core design is fundamentally confusing to newcomers. In order to use Mastodon, you have to understand the concept of servers and how to interact with accounts and links to posts cross-platform. That’s not accessible for people who aren’t already proficient with technology and able to spend the time to learn.
People want and need a unified public space with easy access to peers across communities. Twitter gave us that. Something like Twitter is going to exist for a while. It would be better for us all if a decentralized platform could replace Twitter/X.
If Mastodon had a straightforward onboarding experience and user flow, the web dev community would have been able to wholly move off Twitter in 2022. Instead, confusion around servers and onboarding hampered that intake. Many of us therefore had to stay on Twitter for fear of missing out important information sharing.
Many of the great ideas from Mastodon live on in projects like Bluesky and its AT Protocol. Mastodon does have legitimately great communities and spaces, and for its intended use case is wonderful. But I don’t think Mastodon is going to be a replacement for Twitter any time soon.
Bluesky: Hesitant Optimism
Bluesky solves many of the problems of X: content is on a decentralized protocol; its frontend is open source; its APIs are freely available; it’s not helmed by an abhorrent jackass. Structurally, I much prefer Bluesky to X or even Twitter.
Bluesky and atproto also solve many of the user experience difficulties of Mastodon. There’s only one user-facing website to contend with, bsky.app. The app is similar enough to Twitter/X that it’s straightforward to move over.
Bluesky’s culture at the moment seems much more like early-stage Twitter than late-stage X. My experience has been that people are much friendlier and less immediately critical. I haven’t had to deal with right-wing trolls when I post an opinion like “we should improve DEI in tech”.
Bluesky’s platform also just performs better than X’s. X has had obnoxious bugs for months or years now like the notifications tab not updating until you refresh the page. Bluesky has better performance and is actively adding features such as anti-toxicity features and starter packs. They even have a product roadmap!
The Nature of Progress
Bluesky is still a single VC-funded company. That comes with risk: if the backing VCs decide to monetize quickly, they can force the company to make decisions counter to its users’ best interests. Having the primary domain for all accounts be owned by one company means it would be hard -though not impossible- to steer the community to different owner(s).
That being said, I’m not worried about Bluesky’s direction for now. The team has made a lot of great directional decisions — including staying on a portable protocol that, even if the Bluesky company were to be compromised, could be migrated elsewhere.
A bad actor like Elon Musk also wouldn’t be able to make fundamentally foolish architectural changes like paywalling the API. The backing atproto architecture wouldn’t allow it. If Bluesky “goes evil” at some time in the future, we’ll be in a much better position to deal with it than we are now with X.
I think the community should look at any new social media platform with healthy skepticism. We’ve all been burned many times before. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something new like Bluesky — or move to it when it’s clearly better than the previous generation.
Getting Started with Bluesky
I’m excited to see how things go with Bluesky. It’s a refreshing improvement over X and reminds me of the better parts of old school Twitter.
Even if your X experience is fine now, I’d highly recommend at least trying out Bluesky. Go through bsky.app, make an account, and find some of your favorite accounts from Twitter. I’ve got a TypeScript & Static Analysis Starter Pack you can use to quickly fill your feed with people in my area of work.
So long, Twitter. It was nice knowing you. 🦋
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