Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter

I still feel that an enormous amount of why threads shows up in data analytics is because Instagram just added it on and made an account for everyone.

It wasn't adopted, it was falsely created.

I'd go even further to say that it isn't a social network, it's an add-on to another social network.

> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads

Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.

Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?

It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.

All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

Is it all the ways that matter? The author mentions one way, DAU. Sure, that is important but I can think of other things that matter. The number of “creator” accounts matters just as much as the number of lurkers.

From my experience Bluesky is way better and has respect for the user’s choice front and center. Lists of users to follow is a first-class citizen feature. Their algorithm is a chronological feed, not boosting engagement bait.

I made a Bluesky account long ago and started cross-posting my tiktoks, often on the popular and titillating topic of project management. For a long time it was sleepy as I would have expected. I got a sudden uptick recently, which prompted me to figure out how to port my follows from X, which I did with "sky follower bridge." Bluesky has been a lively, friendly place.

Sky follower bridge was able to scrape my X blocklist, but could not turn it into a Bluesky block list. No troll problems yet so that's OK for now. I still have to host my videos on titok because some are too long for Bluesky.

My tiktok "for you page" has turned to sludge and my followers are not getting my posts without setting notification options. I wonder if the magical algorithm was sequestered in China to hide it from inquiries. Hopefully a Bluesky presence helps.

Low quality article aside, Threads also had a major spike in usage that quickly dropped off. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess Bluesky will be the same. They don’t seem to offer anything new/different other than moderation, which I’m not convinced is enough to shift momentum from x to bluesky

> overtaking Threads

So the lowest bar possibly imaginable?

An extension to port your following from Twitter to Bluesky:

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-...

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated in any way. I just tried it and it worked well.

The head of instagram/threads (Mosseri) appears to have no idea how the algorithm on these platforms work. He is shocked to see how many people are talking about threads in his feed. It may explain how threads has managed to waste such a large captured audience.

For all the ways that matter, find a more meaningful bar.

I think the factor which will determine which networks survive is the ability to handle bots driven by modern AI agents. I’m not sure how even the best moderation features can detect and mitigate these.

For me it's a very easy choice to go with Bluesky over Threads.

With Threads you can already see that Facebook/Instagram is in it's DNA. There's no pure "following" feed. It's instead an algorithmic feed that mixes people you follow with people Threads decides to push. So it's going down the enshittification path from day one.

With Bluesky there's at least some hope that it will not end up as the algorithmic time sinks all other social media has slowly become. I'm all for discoverability, but allow me to decide when and how I discover new people to follow. Never touch my "following" feed, and I'll be happy.

> Meta-owned Threads started November with 5 times the daily app users of Bluesky. That number is now down to just 1.5.

Is this because Threads is fading into obscurity and has fewer daily app users than their peak, and Bluesky has a bit more than they had before in November?

Today are either within an order of magnitude of X?

Threads attracted a lot of people that I left behind on Facebook. It also gets a lot of people that cross-post to every platform. I can't think of a single post that I saw and still remember.

Bluesky lets you block reposts and that has been the killer feature for me. Original content from people I choose is the best recipe for my tastes. Also, I spend a lot of time on niche creative feeds and really enjoy the things I see.

I also like the idea of seeing regional and local feeds. That was an interesting part of early Twitter that was obliterated by national political emphasis. No more political hot takes, where is a good Korean BBQ spot?

Gotta ask, am I missing something with how bluesky is supposed to be used? Every time I open something from there it takes over 30 seconds to load on my phone

I predict Bluesky will go the way of Threads and Mastodon.

Did thread have significant traffic to begin with? The last four to six times I logged on it was a ghost town.

Threads has a massive problem in that it recruits its users from Instagram (there are others but primarily its still a branch of Instagram) which is the domain of AI generated slop and people I actually know in real life.

The whole point of the twitter style firehose is to be not be either of those things. Bluesky honestly probably has a decent shot but I think its still attracting some hyper-orthodox, censorious, thinkers. Musk has gone too far with X[0] but I don't think his vision in the abstract is wrong.

[0] Every accusation is a confession - X is now near-directly attached to the US Gov!

Where's Google's Twitter clone?

It can have AI nobody wants, a bland name nobody will remember, and be quietly sunsetted when nobody uses it.

they are afloat using VC math . I dont think modern web is a place for a social media company. the AD revenue / AWS bill does not make sense. Unless they become a data broker like Meta. Or become the microphone for a group or individual.

threads federates with mastodon, what stops threads getting on the AT protocol? is it just their assumed desire to not share data? they could be a mastodon / AT bridge

live bluesky user counter: https://bcounter.nat.vg/

I find it's interesting that React which Bluesky was built on, was originally license with BSD + patents, which disallow building Facebook competing products.

Another day, another advert for Bluesky. There've been 70 stories with "bluesky" in the title submitted to HN this week alone, compared with 130 in the past month.

For all the talk of leaving Twitter, Twitter has 30x the daily visits of its rivals: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/elon-musk-x-attention-war-s...

My personal view is if you're on Twitter, leave it and don't replace it with anything. Find peace and tranquility in your life.

How is Threads? I keep getting ads to push me to join it on Instagram, but whatever they recommend me via those ads is usually vapid Linkedin-type drivel. And I can’t see it on phone without the app.

People keep missing the point of Threads. It isn't designed to be a pure Twitter clone and doesn't want to become the public square for news, politics etc.

It wants to be a text-centric network that helps release Instagram to be more video-centric to compete with TikTok. And so it wants content that is fun, interesting and light. And of course easily monetisable.

So I know people like having a fight but I see the two sites as being complimentary and both needing to thrive in order to relegate X to the dust bin.

Social media was doomed the moment its users were demoted from customers to exploitable sources of data. Bluesky will inevitably follow the same path of enshittification as every other social network before it. Its current success hinges solely on the nostalgic desire for a single platform where people can gather in peace. The real question is: How many cycles of doom will people endure before they finally stop jumping from one sinking ship to another?

ICYMI, Actor/director/activist Rob Reiner just proclaimed Bluesky to be a racist platform full of evil.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/rob-reiner-says-maga-scum-...

Threads is a good product. My twitter feed is dumpster fire of right wing politics and rage baity post. Threads has been much more balance. Open the app and have a good time.

People have been trying to make Bluesky happen for years. It won't. I believe moderation is fundamental to any social network, otherwise the bad actors always take over. Meta has been content moderation for years and understands the nuances.

People seek "Political discourse", but they will quickly realize our politics are too much of shit-show to have any kind of intellectual conversation. The rage bait and culture wars have taken over. Important discussions of policy, small vs big govt, taxes have taken the backseat. Our "politics" are no longer politics, and won't be for at least the next 4-8 years.

Whats the point? bluesky, threads, mastodon, we have x.com works just fine.

I'm moderately active on X, and helped build an early version of what became Threads (on which I am almost entirely inactive these days). I'm not surprised Bluesky's been more successful than Threads as the X-alternative:

* A lot of the popular content on X is political; Threads' decision to downrank or ban political content makes the posts less engaging. It's understandable from a certain perspective — a lot of the political content is just dishonest ragebait (and I learned to unfollow most political X accounts as a result). However, one of the most interesting things about X is that it's where news travels fastest, and it's significantly less-filtered than traditional journalist editorialization. It's hard to compete with X if you don't allow it, or downrank it.

* Obviously Elon's massive political spending will have an impact on the userbase of the product, since the spending is so one-sided. X has become dramatically more right-wing since he took over, and even more so after Trump's campaign, so there was pent-up demand for something else... Especially something else that allows left-wing political content (i.e. not Threads). There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Elon changing the X ranking algorithm to favor right-wing content, but TBH I think it's simpler than that: more left-wing people left the site (or used it less) due to distaste for Elon, and Elon unbanned hordes of right-wing accounts, who are very enthusiastic about supporting it.

* There's also one way in which X is (openly) biased in its ranking: paid accounts have their posts ranked higher than free accounts... And paying for X is public: you have a blue check next to your name if you pay. In right-wing spaces, having a paid bluecheck account is a badge of honor, in part due to it supporting Elon; in left-wing spaces, it's a badge of shame for the same reason. Although from a technical standpoint the ranking change isn't specifically political, in practice it's very political: many more right-wingers are bluechecks, so in practice you see more of their content and less left-wing content. Bluesky doesn't have paid accounts, and even if it did, it wouldn't organically result in right-wing content being prioritized to the same extent, so for left-wing users it's a much friendlier place.

* This is perhaps more of a personal gripe, but Elon Musk's decision to downrank external links has been pretty bad for the quality of X content. I understand the reasoning: he's trying to keep people engaged in-app, and external links make you leave. But plenty of interesting people use X as a promotional channel for their (interesting) content, which I want to see, and which often doesn't suit tweet formats. So by downranking posts with external links, I see less of the things I actually am interested in. I don't think I'm alone in this, and Bluesky doesn't do it — and I've heard (anecdotal) reports of people really enjoying being able to more reliably engage with that kind of stuff again on Bluesky.

Mastodon is too complicated and segmented to take off. But Bluesky isn't, so I can see why it's having a zeitgeist post-Trump's-election, which Elon helped fund. I'm not sure how much Bluesky will manage to retain its current spike in users: Threads at one point had a similar spike, and most users churned back to X. But it makes sense to me that Bluesky is a more natural home for the ex-X diaspora than Threads, given the reasons many of them left X.

I refuse to use Bluesky because it is clearly being pushed on the masses, in collusion with mainstream media, as an alternative to X. Clearly another attempt by certain people to control information. It's shocking how people fall for this stuff over and over again.

I hope if backfires, mostly draws in users from existing speech-unfriendly platforms and then the number of social media platforms will multiply from here onward and a large number of platforms will compete based on who is most permissive with regards to speech.

Most of the highly suggestible masses already moved off X to Threads... So now that Bluesky is being pushed hard, I hope the suggestible people from Threads will switch over and split up their censorship ecosystems.

It makes sense from that perspective. The censored ecosystems should be separated into lots of small platforms because you need a lot of different filter bubbles to maintain the deceptions and impermeable information silos. A large centralized ecosystem will create too many opportunities for exposure to alternative information so it cannot be controlled as well.

In the future, there will be a different platform for every kind of delusion and each one will focus on its own delusion and will make up stories to discredit rival platforms so people always doubt information received outside.

It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse. They might carry out hacking false flags on their own employees to convince them to not use other platforms they won't feel forced.

Certain groups are trying to will bluesky into being successful. From my personal experience, X/Twitter is still killing it.

I'd imagine Threads will be successful unless Zuckerberg kills it to focus on other things. It's integrated with Instagram and could potentially be integrated into Facebook and WhatsApp too.

Twitter does not need a replacement. There seem to be a popular opinion that it does, but it's not something people are willing to act on.

It's a better app than it used to be, overall.