Many people do not want to migrate their attention to a significantly less active platform.  While natural migration has generated enough momentum to create a meaningful user base at Bluesky, it is not yet anywhere near to impacting the dominance of Twitter. Recent events, such as the Brazil blackout and the post-election Bluesky surge in the US have resulted in around 25 million users, this surge is tapering. Total likes on the platform are consistently decreasing as of mid December, after peaking on November 19th. Bluesky has momentum and attention, there is a large resentment towards Musk among millions of Americans, and overall popularity of Twitter is low. This campaign will organize that existing momentum.

• Since Musk bought Twitter, there has been a growing antipathy towards Musk and the platform amongst many Twitter users.  According to an August yougov poll, favorability of the platform has dropped to its lowest point--38% of those who use it. 

• His endorsement of Trump has alienated a large portion of the user base. As of December, 2024, just over 50% of of American voters have an unfavorable opinion of Musk. That equates to an estimated 47 million Twitter users in the US, meaning there is a huge potential for a Twitter exodus (AP Poll shows that 51% approve and 41% disapprove of Musk) 

As of early January, 2024, around .25-.5 people are joining Bluesky per second.  At that rate, it will take over 25 years for Bluesky to rival Twitter. That rate is fluctuating, so hopefully it will be higher soon! But even five years is too long! Our goal is to see Bluesky be bigger than Twitter by 2027.

Short answer: To make a significant impact on the dominance of Twitter will take millions of people and a long time to organize. Several people with large followings have tried to organize something like this, such as Mark Cuban on Bluesky, but unfortunately something like this will take a ton of more organizing work.

June 28th, 2026 is Elon Musk’s 55th birthday and gives us plenty of time to organize. Millions of people do not like Musk and do not like Twitter but haven’t left yet because for them leaving is hard. This is a collective action problem that needs a collective action solution. If someone has spent years building up tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, they are often not interested in spending their time on a platform with far fewer. On Bluesky, this wouldn’t be a problem—it’s a decentralized system that allows freedom of choice (If an evil billionaire buys Bluesky, for example, everyone can just migrate all their content and followers to a different company that uses the same tech). But for now, there is a major critical mass obstacle to leaving Twitter.  Although millions have gone to Bluesky already, it will take a long time for it to impact the dominance of Twitter and the Bluesky trend could just as easily fade as increase.

The logic behind the Twitter Exodus strategy is that while leaving Twitter is hard now, it gets easier the more people join Bluesky.  And joining Bluesky is easy, it takes almost no time at all.  If Bluesky goes from 25 million to 40 million to 60 million users it will draw more and more energy to Bluesky.  June 28th, 2026 gives us a collective goal to work towards and makes it much easier for Twitter-centric people to participate. It gives us time for the campaign to get bigger enough to be a real mass exodus.  We aren’t asking people to leave Twitter if they aren’t ready yet. We are asking them to join Bluesky. Once someone has joined, hopefully they go ahead and follow people (Skybridge makes that easy!) and post (Buffer makes that easy!), and continue to help build energy there instead of Twitter.  It’s also important to keep your Twitter account so you can use it to tell people on Twitter about the Twitter Exodus.  Hopefully, by June 28th, 2026 there are millions of people with Bluesky accounts who are ready to leave Twitter, just in time for Elon’s 55th birthday. 

As described in the ‘More Reasons’ page, there are many reasons to not want to be on Twitter. But if you leave, why go to Bluesky? On Bluesky you have more control over what you see than on Twitter and Elon Musk has no control over it. But why go to Bluesky instead of another alternative network? The primary reason is that it is the only other comparable service that has the potential to both be as vibrant a social network as Twitter and isn’t controlled by billionaires. Bluesky has over 25 million users, far more than Mastodon or other platforms similar to it.  It has fewer users than Threads, but Threads has many of the same problems as Twitter.  It is run by a billionaire that exerts a lot of control over the platform. In comparison, Bluesky is run by a non-profit board. 

Bluesky is also a semi-decentralized platform, more decentralized than Twitter and Threads, though less than Mastodon. This is important because it allows users to have greater input into their experience on the platform, like their feed and content moderation, as discussed below. But most importantly, Bluesky is designed in a way where it will be possible to move your experience to a different platform if Bluesky starts making decisions you don’t agree with.  This won’t necessarily be easy, but it will be possible, unlike on Twitter.  This is still a complicated issue and Bluesky is working out the details, but allowing people to ‘exit’ their data has been a central part of the design of the platform from the start. 

If you are interested in reading more about this topic, we recommend these articles: 

What You Should Know When Joining Bluesky

What’s the Difference Between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads?

Bluesky's moderation system differs significantly from Twitter  in its decentralized and customizable approach. While Twitter relies on a centralized team to enforce platform-wide rules, Bluesky leverages a system of “labelers” to empower both the company and the community to moderate content. Here's a breakdown of the key differences:

Labelers:

On Bluesky, moderation relies on "labelers," which are accounts that apply tags to posts and users based on specific criteria. These labels can denote content categories, such as "spam," "NSFW," "misinformation," or even more nuanced topics like "AI-generated image" or "potential trigger warning."

Anyone can create and subscribe to labelers, including individuals, communities, or even the Bluesky company itself.  This allows for a wide variety of moderation perspectives and granular control over what users see in their feeds.

Users choose how to react to labeled content, whether to hide it, receive a warning, or allow it to appear in their feed. This level of customization contrasts sharply with Twitter's one-size-fits-all approach.

Decentralized Enforcement:

Bluesky's moderation is distributed across the network, with no single entity holding absolute power. While the Bluesky company currently controls key infrastructure and can remove users from its hosted services, the goal is to shift toward a system where "deplatforming" is extremely difficult.

In a truly decentralized Bluesky network, removing a user would be akin to removing a website from the internet, requiring coordinated action across multiple servers. This censorship-resistant approach differs from Twitter's centralized control, where a single company can easily ban users.

Transparency and Community Involvement.

Bluesky's moderation tools and labels are open and accessible, allowing for greater transparency and community participation. Users can see which labelers they are subscribed to and how those labelers are categorizing content. This transparency contrasts with Twitter's opaque moderation practices.

Bluesky encourages community-driven moderation, enabling users to create and share block lists and contribute to the development of labeling services. This participatory approach empowers users to shape their online experience and collectively address harmful content.

Challenges and Limitations:

The effectiveness of Bluesky's moderation system at scale is still being tested. The reliance on community-driven labeling raises concerns about consistency, potential for bias, and the difficulty of addressing large-scale abuse.

While Bluesky aims to limit the power of any single entity to censor content, this decentralized approach could also make it harder to effectively combat harmful content, especially if coordinated action is required.

Bluesky's moderation system is designed to be more decentralized, customizable, and transparent than Twitter's and thus offers a user a lot more control over their experience. By empowering users with greater control over their online experience, it fosters community involvement and promotes censorship resistance. While there are still challenges, it is a much more robust system than what exists at Twitter today.  

Bluesky allows users to come up with all sorts of different types of custom feeds that you can subscribe to—everything from sports teams to specific video games to political ideologies. Users get to make their own feeds, not rely on the platform to run them with an algorithm. Unlike Twitter, Bluesky’s use of algorithms is very light and feeds just display what people you follow post. 

This lack of algorithms reduces the ability of the platform to overtly influence dialogue and is a major break from how most platforms function. In comparison, as described in the ‘More Reasons’ page, Twitter aggressively pushes Elon Musk’s opinions on to the use.

On Bluesky, wealthy individuals, companies and governments will not be able to manipulate what you see as easily.  In fact, there is some concern in China that the move to Bluesky will make it harder for them to manipulate public opinion. The ‘custom feed’ options allowed by Bluesky have now been copied by Threads, which is clearly starting to see Bluesky as a rival. However, Twitter still does not offer these options.  

TwitterExodus is a nonpartisan, non-political campaign focused on reducing the power of Elon Musk to control our media and our opinions and fostering a more free and equal social network. We do not believe that any single person should be able to influence communication, dialogue, and governments as much as Elon Musk does. We believe that Twitter does not promote a free and vibrant community. Distrust of Musk is not solely a Democrat versus Republican issue—many Republicans and Independents also do not want Musk to have so much power and also do not like Twitter.