At the moment, Bluesky is the number one app on the free app section of the US iPhone App Store, beating out popular social network Threads and AI assistant ChatGPT. A few weeks ago, it was number 181, according to figures from app intelligence firm Appfigures. Meanwhile, Threads is growing at a rapid pace. What’s happening? Elon Musk’s Twitter/X attracted more web traffic on the day Donald Trump won the US presidential election than on any other day so far this year, according to analytics firm Similarweb. At the same time, the platform broke the year’s record for users lost in a single day.

Bluesky has emerged as X’s newest rival, picking up 16 million users, including one million in the course of 24 hours last week. Meta’s Threads recently reported reaching 275 million monthly active users. X, of course, still has a substantial base of 317 million active monthly users, according to Sensor Tower.

What makes Bluesky different?

Bluesky, the brainchild of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, started as a parallel project of Twitter but is now an independent company in which Elon Musk doesn’t have any stake. The separation happened in 2022 and its current chief executive is software developer Jay Graber.

X owns its software but people on Bluesky can run the app on their own servers (that’s why it’s called “decentralised”) and build custom algorithms to surface posts they want to see.

What makes Threads an alternative?

Threads is a platform from Meta and it launched in July 2023. The rival to Elon Musk’s X/Twitter app now has 275 million monthly users.

What is Fediverse?

To understand why Bluesky is gaining ground, one has to look at the concept of Fediverse, which is at the heart of the platform. It’s a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation). The concept became popular in 2016 when Mastodon, an open-source microblogging platform, entered the scene. You like Taylor Swift, you can mingle with likeminded users. At the same time, you can hangout with those who only love coffee. If you are in the mood for a bit of everything, including politics, there is something for that also.

Threads also wants to be a part of the Fediverse and uses the ActivityPub protocol, which lets Threads fly the platform interoperability flag but the company is yet to show the concept in all its glory but Bluesky has already managed it.

Why the shift away from X?

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, a vibe shift has taken place. Threads probably still is the thing: They’re signing up a million people a day. There’s been some news that Threads is going to turn on ads next year which means it’s going to be a big-scale business. On the other hand, Bluesky is a better product and has just about hit mainstream critical mass.

In the last few months, Bluesky has done a lot of things right. They have been smart about its identity, and its discovery, they built products like list, and as a platform Bluesky is better.

At first, it was about a subset of people — read Twitter hatters — who were going to be happy on Bluesky and were hanging out with each other. It got out of that phase in the last few days. We’re now in a moment where people who don’t want anything to do with X are coming to Bluesky.

Why algorithm matters?

Threads is an algorithmic platform and so is X. Open your X account and it is just the algorithm feeding whatever Elon Musk wants you to see, which is mostly himself and people are just reacting to that echo chamber. The distance between X and Truth Social is getting smaller and smaller every day. There is no denying that a group of people like this.

Threads too is an algorithmic platform. You open it and you see whatever Meta wants you to see. But it is a platform that is not the echo chamber of Mark Zuckerberg or anybody else.

X as well as Threads are “creator” platforms. What does that mean? X will rank your post lower if you put links in them, so will Threads (to a small degree) because they’re algorithmic; they’re designed to promote engagement on the platform themselves, so they are closed. These are somewhat walled gardens.

Bluesky, for whatever it will become, is smaller and has only 15-plus million users. But it is designed to be an open platform. You can tell it how you want to moderate the feeds. If I don’t like the Bluesky server that I am on, I can take my account to another server. Bluesky has done a bunch of clever things, like your username is an URL; you can type your username into a search bar and it will load your profile.

Who is winning?

Bluesky is going to keep growing because it made the bet that what people want is Twitter minus the mess. But Threads is having its moment and once you like a platform, nothing in the world can make you return to the former destination.

What lies ahead?

For years, Twitter has been a company in distress but, at the same time, it has been a magical place as long as Jack Dorsey was around. It accomplished a lot of goals that are hard to accomplish in one place. New companies are pulling pieces from Twitter and doing one or two of those things well. No one is trying to “make” another Twitter. It was once a place to hang out with friends and also a place to discover creators and get government information at an incredible speed. Twitter was central to our culture. That’s disappearing.

Mathures Paul