In recent past, Bluesky has been growing substantially. It quickly ballooned to over 20 million users, and at a point, the service was adding over a million users a day. Between the ban on X in Brazil earlier this year, as well as the results of the 2024 US presidential election – a large group of people have been choosing to leave X.
But, they’re not leaving for Meta’s Threads, the more popular X alternative at the time – they’re going for Bluesky instead.
Rise of Bluesky
For one reason or another, people are picking Bluesky over Threads. It could be the fact that they prefer the look and feel of Bluesky, or just that they don’t want to support another social media platform owned by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Either way, the sudden rise of Bluesky is seemingly scaring Meta.
There’s been a number of Twitter alternatives that people have tried using since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, including Mastodon, Pebble (formerly T2), Bluesky, Threads, Hive Social, Post.news, and even Tumblr. Between all of those options, a number of them either completely shut down, or the companies failed to gain popularity – and for a solid while, it was looking like Threads was going to be the only viable alternative. Until now.
Threads had grown to over 200 million users since its launch in July 2023, and Meta probably thought they had this whole “Twitter alternative” game in the bag. While Threads was a viable social media platform, the company definitely hadn’t put a lot of effort into actually catering to it’s users.
For example, I’ve personally never been a fan of how Threads doesn’t allow you to switch your default feed from For You to Following. Sure, X does the same thing – but Threads also hid the feed switcher by default, requiring users to tap on the Threads logo at the top to present that menu. They really wanted you to use For You.
Now, both of those things aren’t the case, with the feed switcher being displayed prominently, and Threads is “testing” the option to set Following as your default feed.
These are all small features that Threads could’ve added at any moment, but chose not to. Now, these features are all here, probably to make the platform more appealing.
Copying Bluesky features
In recent weeks, Threads has also copied a number of Bluesky features, including custom feeds and starter packs. Custom feeds allow you to create a feed of a specific group of people, allowing you to easily track one topic or community. Starter packs allow you to easily follow a group of people who all have something in common. These two features were key to Bluesky’s growth, and made it far easier to curate an engaging feed.
Starter packs aren’t live on Threads quite yet, though the feature has already been discovered by reverse engineers. Custom feeds are already live on Threads for all users, seemingly.
Competition is a good thing
Ultimately, it’s unclear who’s gonna end up winning this “Twitter alternative” race, but one thing is clear – Bluesky and Threads are the key contenders here. At the end of the day, I don’t really care which platform “wins”, but this is an ultimate case of competition being a good thing. Meta wouldn’t suddenly care about implementing all of these key user experience improvements on Threads if they had no reason to.
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