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November 6, 2024. The day after the election. X, formerly Twitter, experienced its largest single-day user exodus since Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022. According to NBC News reporting, Similarweb data confirmed 115,414 account deactivations that day alone. That doesn’t count users who simply stopped opening the app without formally leaving.

The trigger was Musk’s increasingly explicit alignment with the incoming Trump administration. But the exodus was the culmination of years of accumulated grievances: the algorithm changes favoring engagement bait, the verification chaos, the bot proliferation, the moderation decisions that seemed increasingly political. The election was the permission structure many users needed to finally leave.

Where did they go? According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bluesky was adding nearly 1 million users per day at peak, hitting 20 million users by mid-November 2024. The platform topped the App Store charts for over a week. Threads, Meta’s alternative, also benefited—Adam Mosseri announced 15 million signups in November alone.

The Hollywood and journalism communities led the exodus. The Guardian announced it would stop posting on X entirely. Celebrities and media figures who’d maintained presences despite discomfort finally felt social permission to leave. The network effects that had kept people on the platform despite their misgivings began to weaken.

But here’s the thing: X didn’t collapse. A year later, the platform still claims over 300 million monthly active users. The exodus was significant but not fatal. Many users who left eventually returned—either because their communities remained on X, because alternative platforms didn’t replicate the specific value proposition X provided, or simply because habits are hard to break.

Bluesky’s growth normalized dramatically. According to platform data, they went from adding 5 million users monthly at peak to approximately 1.4 million monthly now. The “digital salon” energy that made Bluesky feel like old Twitter attracted journalists and academics but failed to replicate the mass market appeal necessary for true replacement.

Threads has the users—400 million monthly actives—but lacks the cultural relevance. It’s Instagram’s text feature, not Twitter’s successor. The real-time conversation, the breaking news, the chaotic discourse that made Twitter Twitter doesn’t exist on Threads. It’s too nice, too algorithmic, too Meta.

The outcome is fragmentation rather than replacement. Different communities settled on different platforms. Tech workers gravitated to Bluesky. Entertainment fans stayed on X or moved to Threads. Niche communities scattered to Discord, Mastodon, or simply retreated to group chats. The unified public square Twitter represented—for better and worse—no longer exists.

A year later, the exodus looks less like a revolution and more like a sorting. People who couldn’t tolerate Musk’s X found alternatives. People who didn’t care or actively supported the direction stayed. The result is parallel social media universes with minimal overlap, each reinforcing its own assumptions about what online discourse should be.

Whether this fragmentation is good or bad depends on what you valued about the old Twitter. If you wanted serendipitous exposure to different perspectives, it’s bad. If you wanted a more curated experience with like-minded people, it’s good. The unified discourse is gone. What replaces it is still being determined.