Comics Twitter has made the X-odus to Blue Sky….but what next?

Friendster. MySpace. Vine. Google+. Bebo. AOL. 

Social media platforms come and go…and they evolve. Because of choices made by its owner, Twitter/X – always a bubbling acid pit of hot takes and instant vilification – has increasingly been taken over by trolls and haters, with few if any guardrails. It’s an increasingly unpleasant place to be, with the signal to noise ratio at an all time low.

BlueSky, one of the Twitter alternatives that launched when things began to crumble, has been quietly bubbling along for a while. And over the last few days, comics twitter – that lively, malleable community of makers, readers and sellers – has pretty much packed up their tents and moved over to BlueSky. What this means is still very much up in the air….but so is everything else, so join the club. 

Unlike several other contenders, from the start BlueSky had solid engineering behind it, and an affable mood that made people want to stay. I’ve had an account since launch (I’m Comixace on EVERY platform) and mostly used it to post the kind of “I just had lunch” musings that I used to make on early Twitter. While they say shadowbanning on Twitter doesn’t exist, somewhere along the way I displeased the feed gods, and despite having a seemingly robust 20K followers, my engagement was total poop. (Or maybe people just didn’t like what I had to say, always a possibility.)

It’s been astonishing to see the growth at BlueSky over the last week. I’ve gained thousands of followers, and I guess I need to be be mindful about what I say again because people see it and respond to it. BSky has been gaining about a million users a day, and they are finding a place very much like early Twitter, a genial, whimsical place full of in jokes. Of course there is savage election commentary, but lacking an army of blue checked bots, it’s far less tiring. The culture is very much community based, but with a user base of 19 million and growing, that culture will be stretched and tested….and morph again. 

And the exact culture that Comics Twitter (and Wrestling Twitter and Mets Twitter and every other twitter) created may never come back. Creators had already noted that promoting projects on Twitter had become a lot harder over the last two years, as the platform morphed into a more agenda driven form. But still, it was the biggest soapbox at the town square, as thousands shouted about their projects every day. And of course, there was the relentless algorithm pummeling us with outrage-bait. How I remember the good old days when a Twitter war over page rates, or cartoonists working conditions, or some company not paying freelancers, or just some random bad take by a comics pro, would seemingly instantly kick off a week long Discourse. 

Discourse has all but dried up on Twitter, but BlueSky isn’t really built for it….yet. It doesn’t seem to have algorithms; instead people see posts by people they follows, and react accordingly, a shockingly simple format that most other social media platforms have tamped down. It’s long been proven that negative emotions provoke more engagement than positive ones, and traditional social media has taken that to heart. 

BlueSky doesn’t allow automatic posting – so media brands (including the Beat) can’t just automate postings. That’s the worst way to farm for engagement, but when you don’t have an actual social media person (like the Beat) it’s the only workaround you have. But the way BlueSky is set up has greatly slowed adoption by influencers and brands…which might be a good thing. A VERY good thing. 

So far almost everyone who has made the journey to BlueSky has found it a surprisingly pleasant place. The moderation tools are way more robust – you can actually cut off conversations you DON’T WANT TO BE A PART OF for you and everyone else –  and the culture condones wide use of blocking. Of course this had led to accusations of BSky being an “Echo Chamber” – AS IF THOSE ED ANGER LIKE YOU TUBE CHANNELS WITH HUNDREDS OF COMMENTS AREN’T ALSO ECHO CHAMBERS???!???!??! 

But the echo chamber claims really embody the whole problem. As far as I’m concerned, I’m all for civil discussion, as has been the norm throughout civilized history. Someone having a different opinion or viewpoint is part of life. But name-calling, open bigotry, death threats, rape threats, what-aboutism, trolling – all of which I’ve been subjected to for years at Twitter – I don’t have time for the tears. These are rude or wrong and I don’t want it, anymore than I want someone coming and scrawling graffiti on my bathroom walls. Block and move on. 

I’ve been on the internet for more than 30 years. That does not make me an Internet elder, but it does make me somewhat older than some of the people reading this. And I have seen many of the platforms I mentioned in the first paragraph come and go. The early internet was a place where anyone could post anonymously, and that led to insults, abuse, and trolling. To combat this, even early (ish, I know, I know) platforms like Compuserve, GEnie and AOL had MODERATORS who kept the discussion safe and focused. I can say without question that the best platforms were the ones that had the best moderation. Of course, people would always get mad and storm away in a huff muttering about their rights, but THE COMMUNITY sets its own standards, and just as every society has laws and customs, online societies need the same to prevent abuse. 

(I know the above is a very simplistic look at a long, complicated history, but this is a blog post not a term paper. Take it to the comments.) 

Right now, BlueSky reminds me of early internet communities who organized around ICQ or even Usenet. it’s nerdy and enthusiastic while the rules are still being hashed out. (And more jerks will certainly come and that will strain the rules.) Will it ever become the huge promotional tool that Twitter was in its heyday? Probably not. I don’t think we’ll ever have a “universal platform” again.

And yes, I miss that universal running commentary on everything happening every where. When a grisly murder was discovered down the street from me over the summer, I was quickly able to find eyewitness accounts on Twitter. When I endured a frigid Christmas holiday in Maine without heat or power, I could check the Central Maine Power Twitter account to see how much progress they were making in restoring power. Those were useful, transformative services, but the current Twitter ownership does not value them. On its finest days, Twitter was a crackling livewire of memes, jokes and, yes, danger. Mets Twitter over the wonderful Summer of ’24 was a perfect example of that…and maybe one of the last. 

For now, Comics BlueSky is just a place to have nice conversations with old friends….and new friends. Or to see what people had for lunch. For now, I’m fine with that. But how these new conversations affect the comics industry – which had a very symbiotic relationship to Twitter – will be fascinating to watch – unless the whole thing just collapses and becomes one of the graves in the Social Media Platform cemetery.  

Of course, many people are still on Twitter, myself and Comicsbeat and K-ComicsBeat included.  It’s too powerful a drug for everyone to go cold turkey. But the turkey is very cold and increasingly unappealing.

Also, you can embed Skeets in WordPress! 

SPANISH MOSS SWAMP THING

— Francesco Francavilla (@ffrancavilla.bsky.social) 2024-11-17T23:24:46.235Z

Look at that! We haven’t been able to embed Tweets here for months – no idea if it was a Twitter thing or just a quirk of this WordPress installation, but it was a pain in the ass….and one that nobody had any interest in solving. (Elno cut off WordPress’s API access more than a year ago.) 

Anyhoo…exciting times, amirite? You can follow me, Comicsbeat and K-ComicsBeat on BlueSky – the latter two are a bit sparse but….more to come, as we like to say.