The Vibes Are Off: Did Elon Musk Push Academics Off Twitter?

Anecdotally, the answer is a resounding yes. The two major academic communities I follow, mathematics and geology, have wholesale abandoned Twitter in the last several months for (mostly) Bluesky.

The net is bifurcating and, twitter vibes aside, I think we should all be a bit concerned with this “balkanization” of the internet. I don’t blame any one person, and it’s arguably better than everyone on one platform, still…

At least in my experience it wasn&#x27;t all due to Musk. My part of the academic world was quite small, and seemed to be increasingly uncomfortable with the enshittification of Twitter before Musk&#x27;s purchase. Observing that the new owner was a shitlord probably coordinated a departure earlier than otherwise would have happened, but I think the process was well underway already.<p>We mostly ended up on Mastodon, I think. Personally I&#x27;m quite grateful that it&#x27;s no longer professionally necessary to have an extra social media account.

Who, aside from the extreme right wing, Elon Musk stans, and grifters, has <i>not</i> been pushed off twitter in the past year (and especially the past couple months)?<p>Admirable for someone to try to quantify this, though. The Brazil mass migration to Bluesky seems to have broken through another floor for twitter&#x27;s userbase, we&#x27;re likely atop another inflection point right now as basically everything Musk touches turns into MAGA hats.