National Law Journal, 'Stake Out My Space': Attorneys, Law Professors Flock from X to Bluesky:

Lawyers say they’re excited to see more colleagues making their way to Bluesky and recreating #AppellateTwitter, the hashtag used by a community of lawyers, professors and judges on X to share noteworthy court opinions and appellate news. On Bluesky, some attorneys are using the hashtag “AppellateSky.”

Marin Levy, a Duke University School of Law professor, said she created a Bluesky account last year as the tenor on X began to change.

“I joined Bluesky over a year ago and found it promising but it didn’t yet have a critical mass," Levy said. "It feels like that changed very quickly this past week. And I am hopeful it will become a new online faculty lounge.” …

There’s been some criticism that Bluesky is an echo chamber for liberals and Democrats looking to isolate themselves from conservative views.

At a Federalist Society event last month, appellate lawyer Kannon Shanmugam expressed those concerns, though he has also created an account.

“It appears that the primary effect of the election on the legal academy has been to cause professors to quit Twitter in search of new platforms such as Bluesky… where they can find like-minded people and avoid encountering people with whom they disagree,” said Shanmugam, chair of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison’s Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice.

“That is precisely what I warned about in my speech: that the left is simply withdrawing from the intellectual battlefield into a walled fortress,” he said, referring to a speech he gave in September. “And while they are certainly free to do so, I believe that it will leave all of us worse off.”

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  Universities Should Abandon X, by Kevin Munger (European University Institute, Florence; Google Scholar):

Like many other academic institutions, my university is currently considering whether to cease posting on X. Last week, I participated in a panel discussion on “the evolving dynamics of tech companies’ roles in shaping online communication” and whether X was still a channel worth using. As an expert in media economics and the effects of shifting platform dynamics, my position is that the university should quit the platform — and furthermore, that they should think seriously about their goals and strategies before joining an X replacement like Bluesky.

The proximate cause of these discussions is, of course, Elon Musk. In a recently published paper, my co-author Jim Bisbee and I established that the flight from X among individual social scientists began in earnest in the fall of 2022 when Musk acquired Twitter and allowed Donald Trump and the owners of other previously banned accounts back onto the platform. The open alliance between Musk and Trump, as well as Musk’s continuing degradation of the platform’s basic functionality by boosting posts from paying users and encouraging rage-bait bad-faith engagement by paying posters for going viral, has furthered this trend toward abandoning X, which extends to journalists and even, potentially, Democratic Party politicians.

To be clear: Elon Musk is an enemy of institutions of higher education and the values we stand for. His political program involves discrediting and defunding the regulatory apparatus, including the experts required to make governance effective. Every tweet only makes him stronger. It’s not really about the money; he has enough to burn a few billion. It’s about the legitimacy. It has long been clear that we — the legacy institutions entrusted with social and cultural status and regulatory power — are the gold mine into which the clown car crashed, to appropriate Mark Zuckerberg’s famous description of Twitter. The public has become accustomed to using the platform to encounter official communication by government services from the national parks to emergency weather services, as well as information from institutions of higher education. The fact that these nonpartisan entities are confronted with a fully partisan communication environment is the cause of the current crisis.

• Inside Higher Ed, A Second Academic Exodus From X?
• Reddit, Is Bluesky Becoming the New Academic Twitter? 
• Research Professional News, The X-odus: Why Academics Are Leaving X For Bluesky
• ZD Net, Bluesky Is Teeming With Researchers — Here's Why 

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