Checking in on the growth of Bluesky in Massachusetts

Bluesky has grown to be the primary text-based social media network of the Democratic Party and progressives in the last year. As Elon Musk turns X into more of his own personal platform, center to left commentators and elected officials, from the The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol to New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie, have taken to the butterfly app.

As a Democratic trifecta state, you might expect that #mapoli has migrated here as well.

When we first looked at Bluesky in Massachusetts in November, we found that while it was growing fast, it wasn’t quite there yet. Most of the federal delegation and State House were not yet on the app, and it was concentrated in Somerville in Boston.

Since much has changed in the last few months, we decided to check back in, to see if it has taken off and who are the accounts most followed by Massachusetts elected officials.

You can see that data here or keep reading for our initial readings.

The network is growing, slowly but surely

In November, very few of the federal or state-level electeds were on Bluesky. Since then, all of the congressional delegation have joined, though the State House is trailing.

There is better growth in national news, but state-level news isn’t where it was in the Golden Era of #mapoli Twitter, at least in my own anecdotal experience. I still feel the need to check other sites and read the daily newsletters to get a sense of what’s happening, in a way that I didn’t with Twitter, when many of the big stories would break over the course of the day and you could keep up with them there.

However, that could soon change.

Part of the benefit of Twitter was being able to follow what was happening in committee hearings at the State House as advocates and reporters in attendance would live-tweet them. With hearings starting up in earnest, we may soon see whether that coverage is matched on Bluesky. We have some examples of this, with Somerville particularly well-covered, but not as many as I remember on the Bird App.

News and progressives are still the leaders

Most followed accounts by MA elected officials

There has been some changes in the list of most followed accounts by elected officials in the past few months.

Michelle Wu is still the most followed, but AG Campbell has shot up the list to be the second-most followed elected official. We also see that many of the most followed accounts are news sources, with the top 100 most followed including the Globe, WBUR, Universal Hub, GBH, DotNews, Streetsblog, NBC10, Cambridge Day, MASSterlist, NPR, the New York Times, CW Beacon, Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism,

This is a good sign for Bluesky’s eventual growth. Much of the value of Twitter in its heyday was as a customizable news feed. I spoke with state legislators in New York in 2022 who said that they often got news faster there than in their email, even about internal negotiations. If electeds start to use Bluesky to keep up with what’s happening in DC, it becomes easier for the network to hit a critical mass in Mass.

Threads blew it

While Bluesky has become a more mainstream social network since the election, its growth was not forecast by many in the tech world. Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone that was bolted on to Instagram, was supposed to take the crown easily. It had a built in user-base in the hundreds of millions and Zuckerberg’s personal animosity towards Musk propelling it forward.

In Massachusetts, elected officials migrated to Threads earlier than many in Congress. It is still used by some, but never achieved that threshold of utility. Perhaps it was the downplaying of political news. Perhaps X retained enough Republican users that only an overtly progressive app could take off. Perhaps Meta simply didn’t design it well enough. For whatever reason, it seems like that is not a worthwhile place for keeping up with Bay State news.

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