Wagner James Au / New World Notes

New World Notes columnist Cajsa Lilliehook just locked up her fairly large X/Twitter account (with nearly 20,000 followers) and opened up shop in Bluesky here.

I wasn't surprised when she told me this last night (for reasons I'll explain below), but it's actually part of a larger trend:

In the last couple weeks, my mostly dormant Bluesky account suddenly exploded with hundreds of new followers, most of them SL/virtual world-themed. (OK, maybe "exploded" is a bit hyperbolic, but certainly a fierce fucking puff of activity.) And there's more:

Philip Rosedale just joined Bluesky.

The official Second Life account too.

Plus here's a large Bluesky thread of SLers to announce yourself and meet others there! 

Also other metaverse platforms including Rec Room and VRChat are active on Bluesky.

This is part of an even larger trend, as Bluesky recently hit 20 million active users, in great part in an exile move from Twitter/X in the wake of the US election. That was the thing which pushed Cajsa herself over the blue edge:

"So many [last] straws, I could weave a basket," as Cajsa puts it to me. "Musk's tweets. the disinformation, his duplicitous ad campaign, pretending to be advertising Harris. All of it. But, I had a pleasant Twitter environment with frequent use of blocking. I had blocked over 50,000 people. You can imagine, doing GOP Predators, I would get some doozies." (She's referring to her other X account, documenting right-wing sexual predators and enablers.) "Of course, Elon ended blocking, another reason to leave."

As for me, I'll probably keeping using Twitter/X along with my Bluesky, unless and until there's full escape velocity with the latter. 

As for Cajsa, she's still partly on Twitter/X — but just to keep updating GOP Predators.