Is microblogging really dying?

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It’s Memorial Day, if you’re into that sort of thing, and my text-based social media platform of choice is doing what it does best: engaging in discourse about itself. On Bluesky, metrics indicating the platform’s growth is slowing down prompted a lot of people (myself included) to wonder if this entire genre of social media is starting to peter out.

This genre, which is referred to as microblogging, peaked with the popularity of Twitter in the late 2010s to early 2020s. When Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022, most of us know what happened next. He destroyed a lot of what made Twitter work and turned it into a literal Nazi playground. A sizable chunk of the audience fled to Twitter alternatives, including Bluesky, Instagram’s Threads, and even Mastodon.

Bluesky enjoyed a massive spike after the 2024 election, but six months later, the enthusiasm for the platform has cooled. Threads is treading water, and to be honest, I could never figure out how to use Mastodon. Does this mean the era of microblogging is over and everyone is putting down their phone, closing their laptop, and going outside to touch grass? Haha, no.

I’m not sold on the idea that microblogging is dying, but even if it’s plateauing, that doesn’t mean people are moving away from social media. In fact, they’re gravitating toward a mode of content consumption that I find much more troubling.

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