Bluesky is Twitter's Heir Apparent
Anecdotally, I now know a lot of people who have said they're done with Xitter. And anecdotally I know a lot of people who anecdotally know the same. It may not exactly be an exodus because many people aren't deleting their accounts, myself included,1 they're just moving their social activity elsewhere. And since the election, Bluesky is the clear winner of that movement. As Callie Holtermann reports for The New York Times:
Among the largest beneficiaries of that desire is Bluesky, a rival service that has gained more than a million new users in the week since the election, a company spokeswoman, Emily Liu, said on Tuesday. The majority of the new users live in the United States, Canada and Britain, she added.
“We’re seeing increased activity levels across all different forms of engagement,” she said in an email.
I signed up for Bluesky about 18 months ago. My quick take was that they did a good job making it look like Twitter, but that it was sort of a mess, technically. It was way too slow and buggy. Mainly, I wanted GIFs. Time healed such wounds – including GIF support. And I've been using it to post here and there since. But it has clearly exploded in usage, at least amongst my network, in the past week. And using it now, with that cohort in place, it's pretty clear that this is the heir apparent to Twitter. Not Xitter. Actual Twitter.
The little birdie we all remember fondly. The one that was murdered.
Threads tried.2 And there are some interesting elements – notably, the focus on replies versus posts, which also has some strange unintended consequences. And technically, literally, the service has been excellent since day one, as you might expect. But the service quickly turns from fun to frustrating every time a big event is unfolding in real-time. A sporting event. A change in the presidential race. The election itself. Because Threads was built in the image of Instagram, it totally shits the bed when it comes to real time information.
Despite plea after plea after plea, Threads keep pushing forward with their algorithmic ideal. And I get it: it works for them. For context:
Bluesky gained its first wave of high-profile users last spring, and switched from being invitation-only to open to the public in February. It now has 14.7 million users, the company said.
That is still far fewer than Threads, Meta’s competitor to X, which this month reported that it had reached 275 million monthly active users. (A Meta spokesperson declined to share whether than number had changed post-election.)
275M vs. 15M isn't a race, it's a cheetah running against a tuna fish sandwich. Threads will undoubtedly pass Xitter itself at some point next year in terms of active users. But that doesn't make it any less of a bad product for the way many of us want to use it – which is to say, as a Twitter replacement. And I get that Meta may not want that – first and foremost because Twitter has always been sort of a shitty business. One that Elon Musk simply flushed down the toilet.
But Meta is Meta, they could have figured out how to monetize Twitter in a way Twitter never did. Instead, they're trying to turn it into Instagram-for-Text and monetize it that way. But newsflash: images and video are different than text. The shelf lives are totally different. And the algorithm clearly doesn't understand that. Which is why we get updates about the election sent in real-time, two days after it's over. And complaints about those delays surfaced two days after that.
Meta just doesn't know what it has in Threads. They think they do, they do not. And again, that's not some mistake in their minds. This is on purpose, they don't want to be a Twitter replacement, they want to be bigger than Twitter ever was. And all the data points to them being well on their way.
But I still believe that data misses some intangibles of such a network. Namely, without the people pumping in the real-time information to fuel the content, it's going to go stale, fast. And people aren't going to pipe in the real-time information if they're not getting the real-time utility back in return. It's a relatively small subset of the user base, yes. But it matters. It's arguably all that matters. Certainly if you want to be the "watercooler" of the internet. Which Meta once did when it was still called Facebook, but now the company is clearly terrified of news and real-time information post the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and the like.
Bluesky may or may not understand this, but it doesn't matter at the moment simply because it's built in the image of Twitter and not Instagram. So they're starting off on the right foot versus the wrong one. And they've taken some of those Twitter ideas and expanded upon them with lists and feeds and grouped accounts.
And yes, there's the Jack Dorsey element of this as well. But if anything, that affiliation hurt Bluesky in those early days. And especially after he handed the keys to the Twitter kingdom over to the chaos agent – "the singular solution I trust." Now, he's gone. And we are so back.
My account on Bluesky
I created one for the Spyglass feed as well...
1 Yes, yes, I don't need a lecture about keeping the account versus deleting it. The reality remains that until Bluesky is at scale, Xitter remains the real-time information network. It's a lot more work to use with all the nonsense and increasingly, disinformation (not to mention spam), but it's still where you turn when something is going down.
2 And yes, their integration with the "Fediverse" is interesting. And yes, Bluesky has a different protocol it uses, but there are probably ways to rectify this if there's a will, which I suspect there is....