The social media scene has once again been altered by the umpteenth mutation of Twitter and the promise of new airs brought by an emerging network : Bluesky.

But the most relevant question to ask today is not whether to leave Twitter or move to Bluesky, but to recognize that after the successive disappointments of commercial social networks, the time has come to make a real commitment to an open social web, beyond platforms.

When Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, it triggered an outflow of users to Mastodon. In November 2024 Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election and the role of Musk and his network X in the campaign led to a further flight of users, this time to Bluesky.

As some organizations tout their withdrawal of X and others rush to settle on Bluesky, users weigh the pros and cons of yet another move.

As was the case in the previous migration, users seem to have sought refuge in a platform that gives them back a capacity of control that they had lost in the centralized networks.

But in addition to assessing the technical conditions and the Philosophy behind each platform, digital migrants orient their new destination according to the decisions made by their communities at reference letter.

Compared to Twitter/X, Bluesky offers decentralized algorithms(feeds) managed by the users themselves; distributedmoderation lists for blocking accounts that violate community rules; andlabelers to facilitate the classification and filtering of content.

Although Mastodon remains the most radical alternative to Twitter/X, due to its completely decentralized nature and its federal approach , migrants this time are leaning towards Bluesky, less decentralized than Mastodon but more configurable than Twitter/X, although for the moment without a defined business model .

Bluesky was born in 2019 as an internal Twitter project to explore more open social networking alternatives, an endeavor Mastodon had been working on since 2016. But the Twitter team was looking for a model from network where the Username experience would not gravitate so much to the server managing your account, but would be completely global.

In 2021 Bluesky became independent from Twitter and was incorporated as aPublic Benefit Corporation, which seeks to harmonize the for-profit purpose with a positive social impact. For the moment, no business model , although it is foreseeable that paid accounts and some advertising modality will be incorporated in the short term.

Although it may seem paradoxical in a landscape full of technological revolutions, after each migration of users between platforms, there is a collective aspiration to recover the atmosphere and experience that defined the initial (more or less idealized) era of the channel being abandoned.

This syndrome of return to paradise lost also reveals the gradual process of decomposition suffered by "social" digital goods that start being free and offering ideal features to end up becoming saturated areas of advertising, intrusive algorithms and toxic users.

The transformation of Twitter into X and its open use as a political lever by its new owner has not only generated migrations to other platforms, but has also installed in the current discussion around social networks the question of to what extent the new channels that aspire to replace the previous ones have been designed or not to test of billionaires.

Another no less important issue to evaluate in this time of migrations is the ease with which each platform offers its users to move their data, content and communities to other channels. At this stage of the game, starting over from scratch on a new social network is becoming increasingly unacceptable.

The features and failures, the hits and misses of Twitter, X, Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky are revealing that the central question is not which platform to go to, but to what extent the lessons of this history have been assimilated so that it does not repeat itself in a cyclical fashion.

The increasingly accelerated shift from fascination to disappointment at subject of social networks is a powerful wake-up call to online community to move more decisively towards building a trueOpen Social Web that allows users to manage their digital presence and assets with platform autonomy in open and interoperable environments.

That was the Internet in its origin, and it is the paradise that is worth recovering.