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This is mostly a short and thorough rant on why you shouldn't rely on one single platform to boost you up without facing long-term consequences. Take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I should be writing a persuasive piece to bring people to Bluesky rather than a rant against Twitter, but it's a tall order, and people deserve a slap in the face than trying to be sweet with words.

What changed.

Back in October 2024, I made a blog about what to do if Twitter kicked the bucket, like making a backup account on Bluesky, build your audience there, and continue your business as normal. Months passed, and nothing happened. No alternate chance of curating audiences, no engagement, thinking it's the same type of algorithm as Twitter: waiting for handouts. What that means is that the algorithm selectively boosts your most “notable” posts, like face reveals, cosplays, suggestive art, hot takes, to boost your follower count, then leave you in the dark for weeks on end, unless you rely on the algorithm again. Most accounts that do this become invisible in every timeline, including Following. I feel like this is the result of waiting for the algorithm to build the community for you with viewbots and botted likes, rather than building one yourself.

Right now, by staying on Twitter, you agree to rely on the algorithm to boost your profile, then get polluted with viewbots, then having thousands of them use your posts for AI training, and even worse of all, refusing to create engagements on different accounts. This fits the analogy of a person watching their company become a living scam machine, but decided to stay because of the paychecks. In such process, you compromised your skills and labor for someone else's benefits, you compromised your business expansion, and finally, you compromised your moral to remain in "The Nazi Bar".

It does tell a sad tale how we are all complicit in Twitter's algorithm. Again, having a backup sounds like a tedious job, but I've learned it's always necessary to keep your fanbase running across platforms for your own benefits. And you refuse to do so because you think it's hard? Why is hardworking suddenly become something shunned upon now? How did you even get that much followers on Twitter in the first place? That's right, the algorithm has put you in a position where you'd rather wait for handouts, and it sets a dangerous precedence where Twitter transforms into a place where you can just let the machine do the followings for you. It's like an addiction; this algorithm feels an incurable addiction, because there's no tipping point for anyone when engagements do all the talking, even artists. When Twitter dies, and it will, where will you even go? I guess you can argue that people will follow you to Bluesky, but more or less you will have to rebuild your followings. On the bright side, you'd know that the hundred thousand followers, the thousands of likes you suddenly gained overnight, might have already forgotten you. Learning numbers are fake might be a first step to having a better experience for yourself and your follows.

The plague of Generative AI has poisoned the mind of artists that they believe Bluesky is no different because people can click on your images and train it to spite you, which leads to them not trusting anyone, even their own follows. But there is a huge difference between staying in a cesspool where it's even more possible to have your post exposed to those who are undoubtedly willing to train your art, and staying in a place with genuine human beings in your reply willing to support your art.

And them's the fact, curating your backups is important not just for your art expenditure, but also for the sake of removing yourself away from a single point of failure, and moving on from a place that no longer welcomes you. If you insists on staying, then I'd say you deserve what you get.