Bluesky Ahead: Making Our X-it

We’ve been talking about leaving X for a while – see our Shout Out To My X piece  – but the last couple of weeks have brought this to a head. There’s a risk of Bluesky becoming an echo chamber for the people we speak to anyway all the time - we know we need to speak to other people outside the bubble, but X has become toxic and unusable for that too.

Over the weekend people have been joining Bluesky in their millions with their live tracker showing them nearly at the 20 million mark, up from 9 million in September.

To get you started, here’s our starter pack of UK theatre journalists – give them all a follow! https://go.bsky.app/EZ9Eh48

You can also find Team Mobius here: https://go.bsky.app/EUXNTMw

And on our other social channels
Instagram: @mobiustheatre
Tik Tok: @mobiustheatre
Linkedin: @Mobius Industries

We also spoke to arts journalists and influencers for their thoughts on the new platform:

Matt Hemley (@matthemley.bsky.social), deputy editor of The Stage (which has also just joined @thestage.bsky.social), said,

“Twitter/X has become an increasingly hostile, misleading and inflammatory site. It seems the joy has been zapped out of it. I still plan to maintain a presence there as long as I can, but I am attracted to Bluesky because of the opportunity it presents for a 'clean slate' and to rediscover the fun, celebratory side of social media. I think more and more people will be tempted away from X as the months go on, and I hope Bluesky will provide a positive alternative - especially for theatre and the arts.”

Over at Time Out, theatre editor Andrzej Lukowski (@mrlukowski.bsky.social) said,

“I signed up to Twitter in 2007, years before I had any sense of it having a professional purpose, years before I’d heard of Elon Musk. For the longest time it was fun, now it feels designed to be gruellingly not fun, which is my main reason for scaling back my use of it, though I’m still on there for nominally professional reasons. I signed up to Bluesky in April and there wasn’t really a lot going on, but since the US election people have been genuinely flooding in and it is a lot more fun, so I’m using that more. Twitter/X still feels like a slightly more ‘official’ place because so many brands and institutions have a presence there. But Twitter/X’s professional utility had clearly been decreasing since the algorithm was tweaked to suppress links. I’d struggle to predict the future but certainly for now Bluesky feels like a blessed relief, as much as anything.”

At Whatsonstage (@whatsonstage.bsky.social), editor Alex Wood says:

“Aside from the occasional viral moment, theatre fans on social media tend to exist in their own, isolated bubble. But as those bubbles start to disseminate across different and new social platforms: be they Threads, Instagram, Bluesky or TikTok, WhatsOnStage has to make sure it keeps up and makes profiles wherever necessary.

I do think we're moving to a world where theatre audiences are more platform-agnostic than they used to be - and that has been exacerbated by the algorithmic and tonal changes at platforms like X. Beyond Bluesky, we've recently made a concerted effort to grow our TikTok and Instagram audiences - this is where younger theatre fans of the future are discovering shows and creatives.

At WhatsOnStage the principle remains the same: finding and highlighting artists making work on stage or backstage at UK theatres.”

Freelancer Eleanor Turney (@eleanorturney.bsky.social) has just joined Bluesky and says:

"Twitter used to be a great place to meet people and start conversations, and it was also invaluable to my freelance career – I’ve found so much work through call-outs on Twitter or touting myself when commissions are thin on the ground. When it got taken over by Musk that felt like a big red flag, and as X it’s become basically unusable between the ads and the right-wing trolls. Bluesky’s sudden growth following the US election has been interesting and I’m keen to see how it develops over the next few months. I think I will use it less (which is probably a good thing) but hope it will be a source of interesting conversations and potential opportunities."

Comedy and arts journalist Zoe Paskett (@zoepaskett.bsky.social) left far longer ago:

“I left X over a year ago as it was already so unpleasant! But I’ve missed what it used to be and it’s lovely to see the names again that I haven’t interacted with since I left.

Instagram, which I've used in the interim, doesn't allow for communities to build and support each other in quite the same way because it’s so strangled by the algorithm. In the earlier Twitter days, I found friends through queer and arts networks that happened organically. I’m hopeful that we can use Bluesky to boost new things – artists, shows, opportunities – in the way we did before!”

For content creators, starting on a new platform can feel like starting all over again, but Ellie Talks Theatre (@ellietalkstheatre.bsky.social) hopes it’ll be worth it:

“When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I saw a sharp rise in the amount of transphobic content recommended to me through the platform's algorithms. To protect my space as a trans person, I decided very quickly to leave the platform. Since I left, there have been multitudes of changes that dramatically changed Twitter such as the newly implemented change to "blocking" which no longer hides your content from people you block: a legitimate safety concern for many people who want to protect themselves online.

It seems to be that Bluesky was in the right time at the right place. With the result of the US election, Musk's alignment with Trump, and these changes souring people's opinion on Twitter, more and more people wanted to distance themselves from his platform.

Bluesky provides a smaller but more comfortable space, something reflected through its marketing, logos and even the platform's own posts. It is a strong contender for a Twitter replacement but it is yet to be seen whether the short term success will maintain and how useful it is as a tool to promote content.”

We hope that Bluesky recaptures some of the excitement and creativity of a past Twitter - we’ll see you there at @mobiustheatre.bsky.social

To get you started, here’s our starter pack of UK theatre journalists – give them all a follow! https://go.bsky.app/EZ9Eh48

You can also find Team Mobius here: https://go.bsky.app/EUXNTMw

And on our other social channels
Instagram: @mobiustheatre
Tik Tok: @mobiustheatre
Linkedin: @Mobius Industries

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