Once upon a time, Twitter was paradise for sex workers. We could post our thirst traps, network and build community with each other, find clients, and build a following. Then came the hateful algorithms with their dreaded shadowbans. Building a following became virtually impossible, and our posts were hidden from our actual followers who WANT TO SEE THEM BC THEY FOLLOW US! We tried to warn the masses that these tools would be weaponized against political dissenters, but predictably we were mostly ignored. (We’re trying to warn y’all about banking discrimination and the dangers of facial recognition technology too but that’s a subject for another post. Just know that they always test their hateful tech tools on us first, then roll them out for the respectables and normals.)
If you are interested in learning more about this, check out Hacking Hustling’s piece
Anyway, when Melon Husk bought Twitter, we knew it didn’t bode well, but some remained hopeful due to all his yapping about “free speech.” Of course things only got worse for us under Apartheid Clyde, but most of us have stayed because it remains one of the only platforms where you can post tit without catching a permaban for it.
I guess the Neo-Nazification of the platform culminating in the re-election of Trump with Elon’s help has finally pushed us over the edge, because there has been a huge migration over to BlueSky (aka LibSky.) Will it be better? Probably not. But for now, the shadowbans are minimal and fascists don’t appear to be tolerated so here we are.
Y’all may or may not realize it but sex workers tend to be at the forefront of new tech trends and innovations. When a new platform pops up, we’ll be there shortly with innovative new ways to sell hole. So I predict that LibSky may just take off.
TL;DR: if you post tit, they will come
I do wonder if this would move users over, or if SW will just relent and return to twitter as it has a much larger userbase. ofc if you’re advertising a service, you want the most people to see it and be able to pay for it. Blue Sky has had huge migration waves before, it’s topped the google app store before; a few weeks go by and people slowly walk on back to twitter over time due to the more active user base with an endless supply of content to doomscroll. the thing that gets me is. mastodon already exists, and does have a large established userbase, with sex work instances open to signups. BS is trying to be a secondary niche where others already exist. BS is also owned by corperate interests, publicly traded, and has shown crypto leanings in the past. they’ll do some unadvised things in the long run too to maximise profits, and SW are a very easy target when that happens
I hope it works out for online SW, an ex girlfriend of mine used to do it as a side hustle and it did a lot to pay her bills. especially in worsening economic times like this, SW being forceably deplatformed is going to hurt working class people who need to pay every increasing bills
Yeah, we’ll see. I made my account a year ago but abandoned it. It’s super hard to maintain all these damn social media platforms, and BlueSky was not taking off because of the silly “invite only” gatekeeping. Switching cost is a major barrier. I think they’ve done a bit to address that with the “starter packs” option that allows people to mass follow or mass block curated lists.
This is the first time I’ve seen a push from so many well-known SWs with large followings to move over, so it feels a bit more significant.
I should have clarified that I don’t plan on leaving Twitter. I remain firm in my commitment to ride that bitch til the wheels fall off. They will have to remove me. But I am trying to migrate as much of my following over there as possible.
And as for whether it will be a SW haven: it won’t. None of these platforms are. If it’s good for us, it will be good until it isn’t. It’s just the way of things for us. The only way to survive as a SW is to make peace with the fact that you might wake up one day and find your primary source of income gone, either because the platform was seized or they changed TOU and/or you get deleted.
Regarding Mastodon, I just feel like it’s too nerdy for the general public. We had a Mastodon instance called Switter but we never really had clients embrace it like they do the mainstream platforms.
it is genuinely horrifying that through not fault of your own, you can just have your income platform stolen from you, because somebody else decided your kind isn’t welcome around here, and you have to entirely reestablish yourself somewhere else