Why move from X (formerly Twitter)

For over a decade we have facilitated discussions and built a community focused on accessibility, disability inclusion and the principles of openness.

The main platform for AXSChat discussions was Twitter. For quite a long time it was a very engaging platform and we grew to be Europe’s largest regular Twitter chat.

As everyone knows twitter was bought by Elon Musk who made a lot of what we considered to be unwelcome changes such as firing the accessibility , safety and DEI teams and changing verification as he transformed the platform into X.

It is increasingly well documented how he is using the platform he now owns to spread lies and misinformation supporting far-right extremism and attacking democratically elected leaders.  This same extremism poses a serious risk to the disability community that we love and support; whether that be through defunding of essential services, vaccine skepticism or just outright ablism.

We stayed for a long time on the platform trying to be an island of positivity in a sea of negativity but we cannot in good conscience continue to host our community on X when it is being used in such a way.

We will be hosting our Q&As and trying to rebuild on Bluesky Social we already have a starter pack to help you find the community if you want to join us on the platform and will be sharing more resources shortly.  
For now we will be keeping the X accounts open so that we can signpost to our activities elsewhere plus we have a long history of wonderful conversations and are not planning to delete it.

How It Works

Bluesky operates in a very similar way to how Twitter did pre-takeover, whilst there are other social platforms such as Mastodon we believe that this is the most likely to be a good fit for our community and one that has the shallowest learning curve .

Find us on Bluesky every Tuesday. We will post a video interview.

A 60 minutes Social Q&A Chat from 20:00 UK time follows. See the time in your location (Opens in a new tab).

There will be 6 questions for you to join in the conversation.

Use the hashtag #AXSChat.

Keep up to date with the conversation by searching for #AXSChat on Bluesky and take part by answering the chat questions listed below.

For more information go to the FAQ section of the website.