New Friends Jour­nal arti­cle on some of the Quak­er groups leav­ing Twitter/X this week, fol­low­ing Friends World Com­mit­tee’s Mon­day announce­ment.

There’s been a lit­tle push­back, on X and Red­dit, along the lines that Quak­ers should be rep­re­sent­ed every­where. Our arti­cle quotes Alis­tair McIn­tosh, who post­ed on X:

I pre­fer it when Quak­ers bring an alter­na­tive pres­ence to con­flict zones. Has God not already got suf­fi­cient angels in heav­en? Can we not, as our 1947 Nobel Peace Prize cita­tion quotes it, act “to build up in a spir­it of love what has been destroyed in a spir­it of hatred.”

I get it but I don’t think the metaphor holds. No one is trapped on a social network. 

One prob­lem with this line of rea­son­ing is that it fails to take into account the time and resources that it takes to be on a social plat­form. Face­book, X, Threads, Bluesky, Dis­cord, Tik­tok, Telegram, What­sApp, Red­dit, Mastodon… There are so many social net­works and you can’t be every­where. As a pub­lish­er, you have to choose where you place your atten­tion. X has shot itself in the foot time and time again since Musk came in. He has no idea how to run a social network.

The qual­i­ty of dis­course at X had turned to shit. Much of the audi­ence is gone. Posts with links are down­grad­ed in the algo­rithm, giv­ing pub­lish­ers lit­tle incen­tive to stay. For most pub­lish­ers, the main pur­pose of social net­works is to get peo­ple to their web­sites (hope­ful­ly to sign up for email lists). X is fol­low­ing the lead of Meta (Face­book, Threads, Insta­gram), whose net­works have become increas­ing­ly use­less as they’ve down­grad­ed posts with links.

Many pubs are report­ing they’re now get­ting more refer­ral vis­i­tors from Bluesky than X, even with few­er fol­low­ers. For me, this announce­ment is less about pol­i­tics than it is a recog­ni­tion that X isn’t Twit­ter and that the enshit­ti­fi­ca­tion of the net­work is such that it’s no longer worth our lim­it­ed resources or attention.

When Friends World Com­mit­tee’s World Office came to us and said that a bunch of Quak­er orgs were orga­niz­ing to leave X en masse, I respond­ed with a shrug. It has­n’t felt worth it to stay on X. This is as good a time as ever to leave. Friends Jour­nal has been on Bluesky for over a year and the dis­course is sim­ply better.