At Bluesky, the social media start-up that has been adding 1 million users a day since X owner Elon Musk won his all-in bet on President-elect Donald Trump, the company’s 20 full-time employees have been struggling to keep the site moderated and its servers up and running.
It’s not the only company scrambling. Meta, the social media behemoth behind Facebook and Instagram, has launched a raft of tests, tweaks and new features in the past week for its own fledgling X rival, Threads. Several of them seemed designed to fend off the threat Bluesky poses to its status as the leading alternative for people disenchanted with X.
“The race to replace Twitter has accelerated,” said Jasmine Enberg, the vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer, a market research firm. “Threads has been the de facto home for many displaced X users, but the surge of new users to Bluesky after the election has upped the competition.”
“While BlueSky’s user base is still only a fraction of that of Threads’,” she added, “Meta clearly sees it as a potential threat.”
Meta, the industry’s largest player, is moving fast to react to the upstart, adapting by incorporating popular features, much as it has in the past with rivals such as Snapchat and TikTok.
Threads now promotes Bluesky-esque “custom feeds” that give users more control and has retuned its main algorithm to feature more posts from people you follow. The feature echoes Bluesky’s approach of encouraging users to create their own feeds and subscribe to feeds created by others, including many that deliver real-time news and commentary on politics – a realm Threads has sought to play down.
While Threads remains the most popular X alternative, having amassed 275 million sign-ups since it launched in July 2023, Bluesky has been on a tear, growing from about 13 million users to 22 million in just over two weeks. The flurry of activity has lent it a degree of momentum and buzz that social media upstarts rarely achieve in an industry dominated for the past decade by Meta and a handful of other industry heavyweights.
The explosive growth led to service outages earlier last week, which Bluesky said last week it has resolved. Launched as a spin-off of Twitter under former CEO Jack Dorsey, the company has since cut ties with the billionaire and is now majority-owned by its employees, including 33-year-old CEO Jay Graber.
Meta has taken notice. In the past 10 days, the company has touted its own growth while announcing adjustments to Threads that mirror key Bluesky features.
The “custom feeds” feature Threads announced allows users to toggle easily between their main feed and special feeds built around topics or people of interest. That echoes Bluesky’s approach of encouraging users to create their own feeds and subscribe to feeds created by others.
“This is the kind of competition and innovation that’s been missing from social for the last decade, because progress has been locked within tech giants,” Bluesky noted on its official Threads account.
On Thursday, Instagram and Threads chief Adam Mosseri said the app had changed the algorithm that determines what users see in their feeds to “prioritise content from people you follow.” That also makes Threads more like Bluesky and less like Instagram Reels or TikTok, which serve up personalized recommendations of content shared mostly by strangers.
Meta’s moves to head off Bluesky come from a familiar playbook. In 2016, Instagram launched Stories, ephemeral posts that disappear after 24 hours, after a similar feature became popular among Snapchat users. In 2020, the company introduced Reels, a short-form video product designed to compete with the ascendant popularity of rival TikTok.
Antitrust watchdogs have long accused Meta of relying on a “copy-acquire-kill” strategy to unfairly fend off rivals and entrench its dominance in social media. A federal judge ruled earlier this month that a lawsuit by the US government to force Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp can move to trial.
In this case, however, both Meta and Bluesky are still chasing the larger X. While the company declined to comment or share user metrics, Musk said on X on Thursday that it “keeps hitting new highs in usage, because it is by far the most interesting place on the Internets.”
Asked whether Threads’ latest moves were inspired by Bluesky’s success, Meta spokesperson Seine Kim said, “We regularly roll out new Threads features and updates – dozens in the last few months alone – to support the now over 275 million Threads users. And we’ll continue to share more as we work to serve this growing community.”
Instagram has played a crucial role in Threads’ growth, inviting its more than 2 billion users to sign up for Threads and automatically follow the same accounts they follow on Instagram. But last week, Mosseri said Threads will no longer import users’ Instagram connections, saying internal tests showed people prefer to build new communities on Threads.
The recent acceleration of Bluesky is reminiscent of the early success of Threads, which Meta created last year with a small engineering-focused team of less than 60 people in under seven months. The app drew more than 100 million users in its first five days including well-known celebrities and politicians.
Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said Bluesky’s surge can be viewed partly as a response to Trump’s election, comparing it to the rise of conservative sites such as Truth Social in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
“The most widely used platform for political expression, X, has swung so far in the pro-Trump direction that it creates a deep unmet need, which is being filled by Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, TikTok and others,” he said.
X did not respond to a request for comment.
David Carroll, an associate professor at Parsons School of Design, said it has been “refreshing to observe how new entrants can compete with incumbents,” even as it means “there’s no longer a single dominant platform feed” that presents itself as a public square.
THE WASHINGTON POST
