Many of these new users were seemingly fleeing X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. On the day after the election, more than 115,000 people deactivated their X accounts, according to Similarweb data. That's a step far past not logging on. It means giving up your username and social graph. It's nuking your account versus just ignoring it.

Much of that migration is likely a reaction to Elon Musk's support of Donald Trump, and his moves to elevate right-leaning content on the platform. Since Musk took over, X has reinstated a lot of previously banned accounts, very many of which are on the far right. It also tweaked its algorithm to make sure Musk's own posts, which are often pro-Trump, get an extra level of promotion and prominence, according to Kate Conger and Ryan Mac's new book Character Limit.

There are two points I want to make here. The first is that tech and politics are just entirely enmeshed at this point. That's due to the extreme extent to which tech has captured culture and the economy. Everything is a tech story now, including and especially politics.

The second point is about what I see as a more long-term shift away from centralization. What's more interesting to me than people fleeing a service because they don't like its politics is the emergence of unique experiences and cultures across all three of these services, as well as other, smaller competitors.

Last year, we put "Twitter killers" on our list of 10 breakthrough technologies. But the breakthrough technology wasn't the rise of one service or the decline of another. It was decentralization. At the time, I wrote:

"Decentralized, or federated, social media allows for communication across independently hosted servers or platforms, using networking protocols such as ActivityPub, AT Protocol, or Nostr. It offers more granular moderation, more security against the whims of a corporate master or government censor, and the opportunity to control your social graph. It's even possible to move from one server to another and follow the same people."

In the long run, massive, centralized social networks will prove to be an aberration. We are going to use different networks for different things.