[Grendalor]

Yes, this is right.

Nostr will be more like Mastodon was before Elon ... a smallish place for enthusiasts of decentralization, albeit following a different protocol than Mastodon, of course.

Bluesky is already the new Twitter, you can tell. The cool kids all want to be on Bluesky. In effect, the very low rate drip of invites approach they are following, coupled with a virtual megaton of almost entirely gushing, breathless positive stories from the tech press are generating a high pent-up demand and a sense of virality even while it has a tiny userbase. The people running it are very clever, and are clearly doing everything they can to become the alternative for disgruntled Twitter users that Mastodon, Nostr and others are not (and arguably never were trying to be ... Bluesky is, by contrast, trying like heck to be exactly that).

Does this mean Twitter dies? No, I don't think so. What I think it means, though, is that, like the MSM, we will have likely two microblogging platforms that are broken into socio-ideological camps, like we have with most of the other media. It's new for social media, of course (not that there haven't been wing platforms before, but they have been small), but not new for media in general or the internet in general. And one could say that it's actually somewhat surprising that it took so long for this kind of split to happen in social media as well, but it kind of "feels right" that it's happening, given the very divergent ways that people have reacted to Twitter over the past year. It seems "right" that there should be separate services for people based on the kind of ideology and views they prefer, since this is how pretty much everyone rolls in every other aspect of the media already anyway.

[syntheweave]

The political groups are simply rough mappings to "major demographics" of users and their preferences - clout-seekers, self-styled entrepreneurs, collectivists. The actual shifts taking place are all within the old bundling/unbundling saw: some features are now outside of the product, and some are integrated into it, and the features attract or repulse these demographics accordingly.

Mastodon always presented some dealbreakers for the "clout-seeking" demographic, since ActivityPub doesn't flatten the space into one high school class ranking(basic KPIs for this goal like numbers of likes don't synchronize across instances), and instances that behave badly are treated by the broader network as "nails to be hammered down", for better or for worse. And nostr likewise centers visible exchange-of-value which is too grubby and nakedly commercial for the upper crust. So I agree that Bluesky is "it" in the realm of attracting Twitter users, for the moment.

But any of these three could absorb features of the others in time. That tends to happen in tech.

[Grendalor]

Good points.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out, certainly, and where we are in the microblogging space in, say, 6 months.

[suddenclarity]

I see two flaws with that.

The first one is that there's no such thing as left and right. Two left wingers can have completely different opinions on nuclear and covid. So what political topic do you split the services based on? People seem to unite based on who they are against, but does that really work in the long run?

The second is that with newspapers, you're fluid and jump around. With your social circle, you build it to keep it. I'm following people from 13 years ago on Twitter. It works because social circles don't focus on politics. I can discuss fitness with my PT, programming with a university professor, and racing with a driver. Losing out on half of the population because you disagree on topic X seems crazy to me.

[Grendalor]

Yes, but I think there are different sets of users.

Users like you probably are going to want to be where the largest and most diverse group of people is, which will be the largest service. That is currently, by far and away, Twitter. Moving those people away from Twitter, if they do not already have a strong motivation (either socio-political, or use policy, or because their friends and follows have all moved somewhere else), is unlikely, but in any case most of the users who are like you are going to be with the largest service. I doubt that we will have two equally sized services, at least not for quite some time, because many people who are not very disaffected with Twitter will not move.

The most disaffected groups are the ones who have the highest incentive to move to a new platform, and currently many of these fall into the "disgruntled" category, often for socio-political reasons. It makes sense to think that these will be over-represented in the group that makes a serious effort to move to the new platform (if you look at who comprised the surge of users of Mastodon, or something like Post, you can see that this is definitely the case). Bluesky will, at least initially, be like this, I think. In the long run, though, you're right -- most people will want to be with the larger, diverse platform.