Chances are if you were a classic film fan on Twitter, you are familiar with TCMParty, the collective live tweet of movies on Turner Classic Movies using the hashtag #TCMParty. "TCMParty" is also used of the group of TCM fans who tweet using that hashtag. TCMParty originated on Twitter, with the first official TCMParty taking place on September 3 2011. It would expand to Tumblr and Facebook, but Twitter has always been its home. Unfortunately, Twitter would change after its acquisition by its current owner (whom I will not give the honour of being named on this blog) in October 2022, and not for the better. Many longtime Twitter users left the platform immediately after he bought it, including some TCMParty members. Over the coming year, Twitter would continue to lose users. Advertisers fled Twitter (or "X" as its owner renamed it in July 2023) en masse in November. For many people, the past few months have been the final straw. Between the election, planned changes to blocking that would allow accounts to view posts from those who had blocked them, and a change to its terms of service that would allow its AI to train on everyone's posts, people began fleeing Twitter in large numbers starting about two weeks ago. The official TCMParty account will make the move itself on December 1. As to where most of them are going, well, it's Bluesky.
If you don't know about Blueksy, it is a microblogging platform that was inspired by and largely modelled after Twitter. It was launched on October 4 2021. The service remained by invitation only until February 6 2024, when it finally opened up to everyone. As to TCMParty, there have been unofficial TCMParties taking place on Bluesky well before many TCMPartiers found their way there two weeks ago. They were going on when I joined Bluesky on October 29 2023. Someone even had a TCMParty feed in place before I joined. Of course, until two weeks ago, at most there might only be three or four of us posting during any given TCMParty on Bluesky.
It has only been in the past two weeks that we have had TCMParties on Bluesky that felt like the ones we had on Twitter before October 2022. The TCMParty for Strangers on a Train (1951) on Bluesky on November 12 2024 was the first real TCMParty I feel like I have experienced in a long time. Of course, there have been hiccups due to the sheer number of people joining Bluesky in the past few weeks. There have been a couple of times more than a week ago when the feeds were wonky, probably due to the sheer number of people joining Bluesky. That having been said, the TCMParties on Bluesky have been much more enjoyable than most on Twitter in the past two years.
I must admit that I am a bit sad about Twitter. I am one of the original members of TCMParty. It is where I made many friends. It is where I made the dearest friend I have ever had, Vanessa Marquez. Unfortunately, its current owner is making Twitter increasingly unusable. Neither my fellow TCMpartiers nor I are alone in thinking this. Around 115000 users deactivated their Twitter accounts on the day after the election alone. After years of being one of the foremost social media services around, it is fast becoming a fringe service used by the radical right (Parler 2.0). If Twitter is not headed for extinction, it is certainly headed for irrelevance. And it seems Bluesky, a fairly apolitical service, will take its place.
