At the risk of sounding like a vintage Magic Johnson tweet, let's start with the obvious: Twitter is no longer what it was before Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X. Some people like the changes Musk has made over the past two years. Others don't. For many in the second group, the search for a Twitter alternative took on a new urgency after Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November with Musk's very public backing.

In the weeks after the election, millions of subscribers flocked to Bluesky, a social network founded in 2019 as a research project within Twitter and later spun out as its own company. The site's user base has more than doubled since the end of October, from 11 million to more than 25 million. At least a few of those new people, if my own feed is any indication, came seeking to recapture the magic of following their favorite leagues and teams on Twitter. (Bluesky did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)