In July 2023, Inez Woody decided to give Threads a try.
“You know how when it’s something new, you get on there?” she said of the app from Instagram for viewing and sharing public conversations. “I think I might have gotten on there for like, a few weeks, and then I was just like, ‘OK.’”
At the time, Woody — a multihyphenate who works as a brand copywriter, editor and as a reporter for the Chicago Defender — was much more social on X and Facebook.
But over the past year, Woody became less active on X. “Right after the election, I found my spirit feeling heavy — like a darkness after I would be on there. My personal experience is that, since it was purchased by Elon Musk, it’s just kind of taken a different turn.”
Woody said she had followed a lot of X accounts that held differing views than hers. “I actually enjoy being challenged, especially as a journalist. It’s important for us to try to get as much nonbiased news and insights and information as possible.”
But then Woody described what she saw as a turn for the worst on X. “And I’m just like, ‘You know what? For my mental health, it’s just not worth it,’” she said. “And a lot on both sides too, with name-calling and just negative energy. So for me, I was like, ‘I need to go somewhere else.’”
Woody didn’t officially deactivate her X account, the first step to deleting an account permanently. But she turned her attention away from it and hopped back on Threads. “Oh gosh, it is like night and day,” she said. “It’s been a breath of fresh air. Very positive. It literally feels like the sun is shining every day on Threads.”
It’s been called an exodus. People are leaving the Elon Musk-owned X in droves, in favor of Meta-owned Threads and Bluesky, an app that was initially a project of Jack Dorsey when he was CEO of Twitter. Both experienced tremendous growth this fall. Bluesky recently surpassed 20 million users, and Adam Mosseri, who heads Instagram, announced that there were more than 35 million signups of Threads in November alone.
X users who have chosen to post elsewhere are either deactivating their accounts or simply choosing not to engage with them.
Samantha Sunne, a freelance journalist based in New Orleans, was one of many who took note of the huge influx of users to Bluesky. She authors the Tools for Reporters Substack and, in a recent edition, listed what she felt seemed to be the “three biggest contenders for Twitter exodees” at the moment: Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon, an open-source social network. Sunne titled the newsletter edition, “If you’re leaving Twitter” — sharing her brief thoughts on the aforementioned platforms.
Sunne’s recommendation for journalists is to sit on the different networks, plus LinkedIn, and see which they prefer. “I don’t necessarily think there’s a reason to formally delete your Twitter account — at least not that I know of right now,” she said. “The main reason someone would want to do that would be to remove their data, and that was one of my motivations for leaving Twitter.”
Sunne still has an X account, but she parked it. She recently found a tool called TweetDelete, a service that can delete a user’s entire backlog of tweets.
Sunne, who is also co-author with Mike Reilley of “Data + Journalism: A Story-Driven Approach to Learning Data Reporting,” said she has her reasons for leaving X. “But I do think that a wave of journalists leaving Twitter and going to another platform might not be a good look,” she said. “That might sound a little harsh, but I think it’s bad for us. It’s bad for the public’s trust in the media if journalists, as a whole, seem like they’re making a move based on politics — because we are supposed to be politically neutral.”
She said she is worried about data liability, but emphasized that she does think there are reasons to leave X — along with reasons to stay. Sunne encouraged journalists who are thinking of leaving X to examine why they’re doing that.
To Sunne, the upside of Bluesky is that it looks a lot like Twitter. “In fact, it looks almost exactly like Twitter in terms of its interface,” she told Poynter. “And it has the added bonus — at least to me — of not having as many distracting things going on. So there isn’t ‘news’ that you didn’t ask for in the sidebar, for example.” A downside for Bluesky, she said, was that it seems like features are still being rolled out.
The Meta-owned Threads says its mission is “to inspire ideas that bring people together. Some recent tests and launches include an enhanced search experience in which users can search within a specific date range or search for posts from a single account, the ability to create custom feeds, or lists, of people and topics, and an expanded 15-minute window to edit posts. Threads also recently launched its first round of resources for creators.
A drawback of Threads, according to Sunne, is that you can’t use it without an Instagram account. “It just seems like a weird way to implement that, because you can’t just create a new Threads account with an email or anything,” she said. Sunne also noted it’s less common to have a professional Instagram account. “So if you’re a journalist and you want to have a Threads account, you either need to connect it to your personal Instagram — which you might not want to do,” she said, or create a whole new Instagram.
Ben Mullin, a media reporter for The New York Times, joined Bluesky in May. Since then, the journalist said he’s noticed ballooning engagement on his account. In the last few weeks, his follower count has increased by thousands.
“While I have definitely noticed some people declaring their intent to abandon X for Bluesky, I also think some of the exploding engagement might be a consequence of the way Bluesky now onboards new users. When I joined Bluesky in May, I needed a special invite code from existing users, and I gave out several myself,” Mullin said in an email to Poynter. “That rate-limiting feature seems to have been eliminated, as people are now signing up en masse.”
Emily Liu, who works on partnerships and growth at Bluesky, said the open network sees journalists, news and breaking news as one of its core communities. “So this is definitely a community that we want to welcome and support on the network.”
Liu used to work in journalism, too, as a newsroom engineer for The Washington Post.
“We want Bluesky to make social media more like the open internet again, and so I think one core difference between Bluesky and other platforms right now is we absolutely do not depromote any links,” Liu said.
She said she’s seen journalists take on the habit of posting, “Link to article in my bio.” “But on Bluesky, there’s no worry about deranking just because you’re linking out to an external site. So we highly encourage journalists to share their articles, and post links on the network, too.”
Another journalist-friendly point Liu pointed out about Bluesky was the ability to set a website as a username. “This is a form of self-verification on the network,” Liu said. “So you might have seen some newspapers like The New York Times, they use the username @NYtimes.com on Bluesky. NPR uses @NPR.org.” Liu said multiple senators are using the senate.gov domain as their username.
She described this feature as Bluesky’s version of the blue check on X. “This returns the power of verification to each newsroom’s hands, too,” she added. “So they’re able to just assert that this is their presence, because everyone’s familiar with what their website is.”
Bluesky also has custom feeds. “We’re actually the first platform to implement algorithmic choice here. And so what this means is, instead of relying on a single black box for ‘you’ algorithm to show you your posts, and you don’t really know how things appear in that feed, on Bluesky anyone can curate and subscribe to their own feeds.”
Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, Poynter’s digital media literacy project and a faculty member, still has his X account. But he deleted the app and is logged out on his browser. “I still catch myself typing ‘twi’ into my search bar, but more often than not my first instinct is to type ‘bsky’ and check out what’s happening on Bluesky,” Mahadevan wrote in a message. “I’m someone who was addicted to Twitter — now X, but I still refuse to call it that. I was invested for work, had an audience, and was generally the first one in the group chat with news thanks to Twitter.”
Mahadevan said he’s spent a lot of time researching and writing about its attempt at crowdsourced fact-checking, Community Notes. And while he pointed out that it may have helped him quickly follow current events and clued him into a lot of great research, it overall made him a “more bitter, cynical person.”
The pro of leaving X, according to Mahadevan, is that “it will make you a better version of yourself.”
“The con, for me, was always that I had few followers and was not impressed with the feeds on Bluesky or Threads. That’s all changed,” he added. “I ended up on a few Bluesky starter packs about AI, so I was able to build back some of my audience, and I used those same lists to fill my feed with smart thinkers on AI, journalism, misinformation research and internet culture.” Another plus for Mahadevan is that Bluesky’s data is all open.
Back in Chicago, Woody has been enjoying her Threads account. The journalist and brand copywriter has sought community and connection with other Black female journalists and other Black women who are interested in genealogy. With the hashtag, #BlackThreads, she posed a pre-Thanksgiving question: “Are you using jiffy or homemade cornbread for your dressing?” The post got nearly a dozen responses; mostly everyone said homemade.
Woody said she’s also secured multiple consulting opportunities from Threads. She still has not signed up for Bluesky, but said she does intend to.
On Threads, she recently asked: “What is it about this app that feels so light, liberating and satisfying at the same time?”
