The X-Files: How Irish Twitter users moved to Bluesky

October 2022 saw Elon Musk complete his much-mooted takeover of Twitter after dominating the news cycle for most of 2022.

In April 2022, Musk tweeted “for Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far-right and the far-left equally.”

Cut to January 2025, and Musk’s Twitter, now renamed X (but never actually referred to as that in polite conversation), played host to an interview between Musk and far-right German politician Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s most mainstream far-right party since the 1930s.

Even before the Weidel interview and his now-infamous salute at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Twitter was being abandoned in droves by users.

A late 2024 report from American technology website Mashable reported that in the United States, Twitter’s active user base went from 32.3 million in September 2024 to 29.6 million the following month.

A March 2024 report from Forbes reported a 30% drop in traffic year-on-year compared to March 2023, the first full year of Musk’s ownership.

Mastodon briefly became a haven for Irish Twitter users in late 2022 when Musk’s takeover was confirmed, but it is Bluesky that has become the most serious competitor to the Twitter crown.

Bluesky saw a massive surge in activity in November 2024 following Trump’s re-election in the United States, with Bluesky going from 10 million users in September 2024 to 20 million by the end of November.

The most up-to-date statistics for Bluesky have the platform at over 25 million active users; it was on less than 100,000 users in May 2023 when the platform was invite-only.

Closer to home, Virgin Media News reporter Richard Chambers said of Musk “journalists and news organisations the world over continue to pay him; it baffles me, personally. He stomps all over press freedoms, amplifies disinformation, tips the scale for his chosen political allies and bankrolls them.”

Chambers was one of the most high-profile Irish Twitter users to make the move to Bluesky in 2023, and RTÉ radio presenter Rick O’Shea was an early adoptee of Bluesky too.

O’Shea was one of the earliest adopters of Twitter in March 2008 and said of the platform “in the early days for me it was just a way to communicate with interesting people who did varied things in life and a place to plug your work and the work of people you liked and admired.”

“By the time you scroll forward to 2023, I had enough and finally left. For years it had been a very imperfect place, full of bad actors, but at that stage, it had become somewhere that was actually incentivising and rewarding people posting the worst sort of content,” he said.

Leaving Twitter wasn’t an easy decision for O’Shea (“I burned an account with 60,000 followers”, he told us) but remarked, “life is too short to stick your head into a beehive every day.”

Whether Bluesky has the right stuff is another question, saying the platform “is a strange one for me.”

“So many people say that it feels like early Twitter, and it does. The Irish subset in particular is full of creatives, academics, and people who are just there to interact, not find conflict,” he noted.

There are caveats, he noted, pointing out “there no guarantee that it won’t be changed, sold or altered in 3 months time to become a reflection of Twitter.”

“I’m enjoying it while I can, but I don’t have any real optimism for it, or any social media platform in the long run; late-stage capitalism demands that businesses do everything they can to turn a buck and that usually involves a race to the bottom,” he mused.

Numerous Irish political personalities and parties are on Bluesky; Green leader Roderic O’Gorman was an early user of the platform, People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy is an active user, and accounts have been created for Labour, The Greens, Social Democrats and People Before Profit.

Since this article appeared in print, Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien has created a Bluesky account, while Fianna Fáil MEP Barry Andrews has started posting.

This naturally invites the question – isn’t Bluesky just for progressives and Twitter just for conservatives? Surely the whole point of social media was to bring people together instead of putting people in different tents?

Green councillor Ray Cunningham said  “the problem for any organisation using social media to communicate is that there are a lot of people still on Twitter, and not on other platforms”

“If the Luas, for example, stopped posting news of stoppages on Twitter, and only posted on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, some people wouldn’t get the information.”

“If you want as many people as possible to see what you are saying, it’s difficult to cut off an information channel, but Twitter seems to be in rapid decline, with fewer people there or only there, and less interaction,” he noted.

He said there is a school of thought that by posting on Twitter it puts money in Elon Musk’s pocket, so people should stop using the service.

“The thing is, it doesn’t matter whether he makes money from Twitter or not. He overpaid for it, and can afford to keep it running at a loss. He bought it for the influence, like rich people in the past buying newspapers. As we saw this week, it paid off.”

The Ballyfermot-Drimnagh councillor noted Twitter used to belong to a different billionaire – Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who was on the board of directors at Bluesky until May 2024.

While Bluesky “doesn’t contain as much abuse” per Cunningham, he said, “it is still a private space owned by a billionaire; I don’t use it because I approve of it politically.”

“The political choice, really, is to use as little social media as possible. It’s white noise for the brain. Put the phone down and read a book, or talk to people in person, or go for a walk – something that engages with the world.”

It has been noted by political scientists that the 2008 American presidential election was the first election where social media played a pivotal role in shaping the outcome; now in the aftermath of another historic election, both at home and abroad, social media’s time in the spotlight is now under serious scrutiny.