Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and then turned it into X, disgruntled users have been talking about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post a little about how X has gotten worse to use, how it harbors white supremacists, how it pushes right-wing posts into their feed, or how distasteful they think Musk has been cozying up to Donald Trump. Then they would go. Or at least some of them did. For the most part, X has remained closest to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.

But that may have changed. After Trump’s election victory, more people seem to have become serious about leaving. According to Similar weba social media analytics firm, the week after the election saw the largest increase in account deactivations on X since Musk took over the site. Many of those users have migrated to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.

X has millions of users and can afford to release a few here and there. Many liberal celebrities, journalists, authors, athletes and artists still use it – but that they will continue to do so is not guaranteed. In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses wider relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X. If the platform becomes akin to “alt-tech platforms” like Gab or Truth Social, this shift would be good for people on the right who want their politics validated. It may not be as good at persuading people to join their political movement.

The number of people leaving X indicates that something is changing, but raw user numbers have never quite captured the point of what the site was. Twitter’s value proposition was relatively influential people talking to each other about it. In theory, you could log on to Twitter and see a country singer taking on a news anchor, billionaires bloviating, artists talking about media theory, historians getting into vicious arguments, and celebrities sharing vaguely interesting details about their lives. More than anywhere else, one could see the unvarnished thoughts of the relatively powerful and influential. And anyone, even you, might be able to strike up a conversation with such people. As each wave leaves X, the location becomes progressively less valuable to those who stay, leading to a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.

Here’s how to get something close to Gab or Truth Social. They’re both platforms with modest but persistent user bases that could be useful for conservatives to message their base: Trump owns Truth Social and has announced many of his cabinet picks on the site. (As Doug Burgum, his nominee for Secretary of the Interior, said earlier this month: “Nothing is true until you read it on Truth Social.”) But the platforms are of little use to the public. Gab and Truth Social are rare examples of actual echo chamberswhere conservatives can gather to energize themselves and reinforce their ideology. These are not spaces that mean much to anyone who is not only conservative, but extremely Conservative. Normal people don’t log into Gab and Truth Social. These places are for political obsessives whose appetites aren’t satiated by talk radio and Fox News. They are for open anti-Semites, shameless neo-Nazis who post swastikas, transphobes and people who say they lack to dead democrats.

Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right-wing, it will become a much larger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social. Truth social reportedly had just 70,000 users in May, and a 2022 study found that just 1 percent of American adults get their news from Gab. Still, the right successfully carrying out a Gabification of X does not mean that moderates and everyone to their left would have to live on a platform dominated by right-wing and mainstream conservative perspectives. It would only mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will be disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape a broader discourse.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully created moral panic around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has pointed directly at X as a tool which has allowed him to reach a general audience. The reason right-wing politicians and influencers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens continue to post about it instead of on conservative platforms is because they want what Rufo wants: a chance to push their perspectives into the mainstream. This benefit is lessened when most of the people watching X are just other far-rights who already agree with them. The fringe, avant-garde segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.

Liberals and the left don’t need the right to be online the way the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics requires constant confrontations – literal reactions – on the left. People like Rufo would have a much harder time trying to influence opinion on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often important to parts of the right. This explains the popularity of certain X accounts with millions of followers, like Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.

The more liberals leave X, the less value it adds to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and opportunities for trolling. The X exodus will not happen overnight. Some users may be reluctant to leave because it’s hard to re-establish an audience built up over the years, and network effects will keep X relevant. But it is not a given that a platform will last. Old habits die hard, but they can die.