Comic Books

In 2022, Bleeding Cool got the word that DC Comics had encouraged its talent pool to make accounts on the social media app Hive and to build their audience using the hashtag #comicstwitter rather than on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, in the wake of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Basically, no one listened. And Hive frittered away fast. Mastodon has stuck around a bit. Threads is basically Instagram and Facebook, and it may prove to be a contender. But newcomer Blue Sky or Bluesky seems to have taken the lead in Twitter/X alternatives in the last year or so. And with the recent election results and more changes to X regarding blocklists and the like, more people are looking for alternatives. We mentioned JH Williams III the other day, but Greg Pak has recently set out the state of play.

Greg Pak posted to X after a long time having not. He writes "this has been my Twitter profile image for months. Please feel free to use it yourself if you're locking down and walking away. And on his website, he writes, "Twitter is now run by someone who regularly platforms bigotry and transphobia and shares unconscionable lies and conspiracies. The site is also becoming less safe all the time, allowing harassers and even literal neo-Nazis to post and, most recently, promising to deprecate its block function. So almost exactly a year ago, I deleted most of my posts and stopped using the site for anything other than pointing folks to other, better sites to use instead. The best of those alternative sites? I don't generally love cheerleading for corporations and realize that any product can fall apart at any time. But after a couple of years of trying almost everything, I'm pretty sure the best Twitter alternative for me is Bluesky — by a long shot."

He also lists a number of prominent comic book creators, journalists and the like on BlueSky, and talks about the advantages the site has, such as the Nuclear Block.