Monday Editorial: Social Media Migration – Leaving Twitter for Bluer Skies

In addition to being the primary writer, editor, and publisher of Sean Kelly on Movies, as the operator of a sole proprietorship, I am also the primary social media marketer. This is arguably the most important job of running a blog or website since it helps to ensure that people read whatever I write. As a very tech-savvy individual, I was an early adopter of most social networks, with me even having a MySpace page back in the day. I have been on Facebook the longest, joining when the site was still only available to college students (I was at York University at the time). However, this editorial is about Twitter.

15 years with Twitter

According to my Twitter Profile, I joined in July 2008, which means that I have been on the site for 15 years this month. Sadly, it also appears like my time with Twitter is about to come to an end. Ever since Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, it appeared like the social network was a sinking ship. However, I tried for the longest to stick with Twitter.

As of this writing, I have 1219 followers on Twitter, which is the most I have for any social media site. The next closest would be my Instagram profile, which has 682 followers. Because of the high follower count, I wanted to stick with Twitter as one of my primary outlets for marketing the posts I write. However, it now looks like I am going to be forced elsewhere.

This past weekend, Elon Musk instilled a data limit on Twitter, resulting in users not being part of the Twitter Blue subscription only having access to 600 tweets a day. While this did not affect me personally, as I had a Twitter Blue subscription since March, it did affect most people in my Twitter feed. As such, I realized that no matter how much it will hurt my follower count, the time has probably come for me to move elsewhere.

Social Media Migration – Mastodon and Bluesky

This is not the first time I considered leaving Twitter. When Elon Musk first took others, I joined others in considering Matodon as a possible alternative. I created a profile and even set up an app to sync my tweets. However, when the Twitter API stopped being readily available, so did the syncing app, and my Mastodon profile soon become dormant, with me only recently starting to post there again.

While Mastodon did not take off, people are now placing their bets on a new Twitter alternative called Bluesky, which was partially funded by one of the original Twitter founders. Bluesky is currently in beta and requires an invite to join, though that didn’t stop a mass social media migration to start of Twitter users abandoning ship to Bluesky.

To demand to get onto Bluesky was so high that even though I managed to get ahold of an invite code, I had to wait to use it since new signups were temporarily disabled. However, this morning I finally got through and got myself a Bluesky profile. The question now is where do I go from here?

It’s going to be tough to rebuild my follower count on Bluesky to a level remotely close to what I have on Twitter. I am probably going to end up making Facebook and Instagram my primary social media networks, which may soon include their own Twitter competitor called Threads. One thing that’s for sure is that the social media landscape is changing and this little movie review website will have to also change to adapt.