Nov 26, 2024

Meta Launches a Bluesky Competitor

It's called 'Threads' -- perhaps you've heard of it...

Well, well, well. For months and months and months and months it feels like my entire 'Following' feed on Threads has been dominated by calls for Meta to stop shoving their Instagram-ified algorithmic feed in our faces. Perhaps you've missed much of this because the company refused to let you change the default feed from their clearly preferred 'For You' timeline. And so instead, perhaps you've seen some nice posts about Leica lenses. Or re-lived the US election a week after it was over. Or saw some other viral nonsense, likely ripped-off from elsewhere.

In flew Bluesky. And out went Meta's religion on their algorithm. Funny what a bit of competition can do.

Of course, to hear Meta spin it, they're always working on many changes and features behind the scenes. This was all a part of the plan, you see. Sure, a plan that was implemented over the past week after Bluesky walked up and punched Threads in the face.

Now we're getting it all. Custom feeds (one of the key features of Bluesky, rolled out after Threads tested it for a whole five days). And look, actually useful versions of Search and Trending. "Rebalancing" the main algorithmic feed to be more built around who you explicitly follow – a sort of comical compromise for a stubborn company that clearly did not want to change that feed. But when those changes failed to arrest Bluesky's growth, a few days later we got – wait for it – a "test" to set the 'Following' feed to your default feed.

Look, the blogosphere is full of backseat drivers – this is the internet, that's what we do. But the need for such changes have been so clear to so many of us for so long that you really have to question Meta here and the long-term prospects for Threads. They just don't seem to get it. Again, until they're punched in the face.

And I sort of get it. I understand that they thought that by leveraging both Instagram's graph and algorithm, they could build a service that would surpass even the peak of Twitter. And all the data points they were seeing, in particular with user growth, had to signal to them that they were on the right path. But here, again, we – the annoyingly vocal user base – have been making the case for months that such numbers are deceiving. Meta wasn't building the town square, they were building the town pyre. Bluesky simply flew in with a match.

That's overstating the situation, of course. But no less than Instagram head Adam Mosseri is pushing back against reports that Bluesky is surging close to – if not past – Threads in usage. The fact that he feels the need to weigh in – not to mention the suddenly quite active Mark Zuckerberg – says everything. As does the counter-programming. Meta is worried they crapped the bed here and failed to see what they should have been building.

Again, they'll probably say something along the lines of "Twitter was a pretty bad business, even pre-Elon Musk, even as a public company" and "it was a relatively tiny social network that couldn't monetize at scale" but "was also a cesspool of content and moderation challenges". All fair points. And yet, when big news is happening, it's that shitty network that we're all drawn back to in order both to try to understand what the hell is going on and to have some communal sense that we're not alone.

Unfortunately, for Meta, that means both handling and surfacing news. We all get why Meta would prefer not to do that – been there, got screwed by that. But that's the name of the game. And the real-time dissemination of that news is the lifeblood of such a network.

Yes, that makes content moderation nearly impossible at scale. But guess what? If your Llama models are what you've cracked them up to be, this is how you eventually solve such problems. In the mean time, you hire more moderators. You're a trillion-dollar company, you can do this.

Again, I know that you'd prefer not to. And instead would like a nice little network that's like Instagram but with text instead of images and video. For creators. Or something. That's nice. No one else wants that. They might be willing to try it out – especially if you're willing to shove it in the face of your billion-plus users on other networks you control. But they won't actually use it beyond such a trial. Or stick around for long. Threads only shot is to act as a Twitter replacement. I'm sorry I have to break this news to you now. I've been trying for months.

Again, maybe that's not compelling enough to pour resources into. That's your call. In that case, maybe port all those highly-touted 275M users over to Bluesky? Otherwise, get back to work building Threads with this new mentality. Try to break through the usage ceiling Twitter flew up against. Compete with Bluesky. And yes, Xitter. Competition is good – as we've all seen this week.