PG appears to differ:

https://x.com/paulg/status/1858122600934752464

https://x.com/paulg/status/1859202098589585604

Feels very organic actually considering it has been around for a while now and people are only now beginning to move to it in droves.

It's definitely snowballing now. Other than chatgpt, it's been years since the last time that's happened?

Call it a tipping point, call it a collective action problem finally being resolved, snowballing, viral liftoff, or belittle it and call it a "herd stampede" if you really want.

But those are all "organic" phenomena. The grandparent comment that called it "inorganic" seems to be mistaken.

There is this cynical (and maybe often warranted) take that any sudden uptake or virality is astro-turfing or I inorganic or shilling.

Not the case here though, I see it myself how basically all my old Twitter communities have migrated and things are really vibrant. Block lists, mute words and starter packs mean I we exactly what I want to see, which adds to the appeal.

It’s been a while since someone has wilfully destroyed a thing that has an obvious replacement. Last one was probably Digg.

I was a highschool senior when Facebook came out, back when you needed an email with a university's domain name to sign up. That one was driven by pure FOMO. Everyone's older friends were on it and going to cool frat parties and you were just stuck on the outside looking in. LiveJournal and Myspace had nothing on that.

I don't know about "inorganic", but something definitely happened.

I only tangentially heard of BlueSky and now suddenly it's everywhere.

I mean ... SiriusXM (hardly a forerunner of fashion) just had one of the DJs mention BlueSky.

Something is definitely up.

Why is it so unbelievable to you that a different platform with seemingly happy users could have a viral moment through word of mouth, right as a whole lot of people are actively seeking alternatives?

Let’s put it this way: if a huge amount of people suddenly find themselves done with twitter, what serious alternatives are there beside Bluesky?

I actually think there are a few, only some have achieved critical mass with smaller subnetworks. BlueSky and Threads both seem to have attracted non-tech networks although Threads downranked political content, so BlueSky seems like the natural next mass appeal product.

Others:

Mastodon: many tech subnetworks (security, data)

Nostr and Warpcast: Crypto

>Something is definitely up.

Well duh - the figurehead of X buddied up with Trump so the dems are leaving.

It's grown slowly and deliberately. It only broke out because of the election and Elon's antics. Feels about as organic as it can get.