There is no longer any doubt that Threads and Bluesky have developed the most viable alternative to the platform once known as Twitter. But while the two services may share some of the same goals, they represent very different visions of how text-based social networks should operate.
Of course, the thread is controlled by the meta, and the meta is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. While the company claims to embrace “public conversation,” it also consistently emphasizes encouraging certain types of speech over others. The company suppressed “political” content in an election year, forcing users to adjust their settings to allow posts about elections and “social topics” to appear in their “for you” feeds.
The desire to limit what Mehta described as “potentially sensitive” content also led to some questionable moderation decisions. The app has been searching for several topics for several months, including those related to COVID-19 and vaccines. These restrictions have since been lifted, but many other mysterious instances of moderation failures have occurred on the thread.
In October, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that after users reported being penalized for using words like “salty” and “cracker” in their accounts, the company “found the mistake and made changes.” He admitted that he had added “. Earlier this month, Andy Stone, Director of Communications at Meta Users say searches for posts about Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, are blocked on the app because the content “may be related to drug sales.” After what happened. Stone did not provide an explanation, but said the issue had been resolved.
Bluesky, on the other hand, takes a less top-down approach to moderation. The company employs some of its own moderators to enforce “baseline moderation,” but users are free to control how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. Blueksy also allows users to further customize and create their own experiences.
“Moderation is like governance in many ways,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graeber told me earlier this year. “And setting norms for social spaces should not be the unilateral decision of one person or one company for an entire ecosystem where people are having public conversations that are important to the state of the world. That’s what we think.
This philosophy is utilized in other important ways as well. Twitter never was Even before Elon Musk bought it, it accounted for the majority of most publishers’ traffic. But the platform was once played within the news ecosystem. As soon as Elon Musk admitted that And a top Threads executive said Meta doesn’t want to “encourage” it. Blue Sky leaders To encourage link sharing, some publishers Compare with Threads and X from Bluesky.
But perhaps the most obvious difference between Meta and Bluesky’s approaches is the order in which posts are displayed. Bluesky defaults to a reverse chronological feed that shows posts from accounts you follow. Users can also choose to add based on hundreds of different topics. For example, I follow the “Cat Photos” feed, which displays posts with pictures of cats, and the “Trending News” feed, which displays links to widely shared news articles on the platform.
And while Meta recently released its own version of Masu. . (Meta said it would allow users to default to the feed they follow, but did not provide an update.) And even content creators can earn hundreds of dollars by posting on the platform’s Threads. , it is also telling that he has been paid thousands of dollars.
More important changes will occur in 2025. Both Threads and Bluesky have been happily ad-free so far, but both services ultimately need to make money.
BlueSky has previously experimented with other ways to make money, including selling custom domains and an upcoming service that would provide additional features to paying users. Although Mr. Graeber did not completely do so, Although she is promoting it, she has also made it clear that she does not want to do that.This is a service aimed at promoting “.
Threads, on the other hand, is already connected to Meta’s multibillion-dollar advertising machine and is as intrusive as many believe the company’s app is. Their conversation (repeated theory) .) Zuckerberg is The company is in no hurry to turn Threads into a “very large business,” reports say it could happen as early as January, and Meta finally adopts the same strategy as all companies Other services for which there is little reason to believe that they will not.
All of this makes Bluesky even more of an underdog. The thread size has already increased by more than 10 times, and Meta has made it clear that there is no problem using copy-or-kill. For emerging companies.
But that’s exactly why so many Bluesky users believe the platform is” While Threads and X put the public conversation in the hands of autocratic billionaires, Bluesky is an independent organization that is building its platform more democratically. This platform is but it puts much more control in the hands of the user. We welcome developers who have created numerous third-party apps for the service.
Ultimately, it may not be enough to fend off Meta, which can afford to spend billions on Threads. But Bluesky’s vision for an open source decentralized platform goes far beyond becoming the next big social media site. “We set out to fundamentally change how social media works,” Graeber said at a recent press event. “We want people to have a choice about what they see.”
