There is no longer any doubt that Threads and Bluesky have created the most viable alternatives to the platform formerly known as Twitter. But even though the two services share some of the same goals, they have shown very different visions for how text-based social networks should work.
Of course, Threads is controlled by Meta, itself controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. And while the company claims to embrace “public conversation,” it has also always put its thumb on the scale to encourage certain types of speech over others. The company limited “political” content during an election year, forcing users to change their settings to allow posts about elections or “social topics” to appear in their “for you” feed.
This desire to limit anything that Meta describes as “potentially sensitive” content has also led to questionable moderation decisions. For months, the application research on certain topics, including those related to COVID-19 and vaccines. These limits have since been lifted, but there have been many inexplicable cases of other moderation failures on Threads.
In October, Instagram head Adam Mosseri admitted that the company had “found errors and made changes” after users reported that their accounts had been penalized for using Instagram. like “saltines” and “cracker”. Earlier this month, Meta Communications Director Andy Stone after users noticed that searches for articles about Austin Tice, the American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, were being blocked on the app because the content “could be associated with the sale of drugs”. Stone did not provide an explanation but said the problem had been resolved.
Bluesky, on the other hand, has taken a less top-down approach to moderation. Although the company employs some of its own moderators to enforce “basic moderation,” users have a lot of control over how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. Blueksy also allows users to create their own for an even more personalized experience.
“Moderation is in many ways like governance,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. “And in setting the standards for a social space, we don’t think any one person or company should unilaterally decide that for an entire ecosystem where people are having public conversations that are important to the state of the world.”
This philosophy manifests itself in other important ways. Twitter has never been a of traffic for most publishers, even before Elon Musk’s takeover. But the platform used to play in the information ecosystem. At a time when Elon Musk recognized that and Threads CEO said Meta didn’t want to ‘encourage’ the leaders of Bluesky have to encourage link sharing, and several publishers have reported seeing from Bluesky, compared to Threads and X.
But perhaps the most obvious difference between Meta’s approach and Bluesky’s is the order in which posts appear. Bluesky uses a reverse chronological feed by default that displays posts from accounts you follow. Users can also choose to add based on hundreds of different topics. For example, I follow a “cat photos” feed that features posts featuring photos of cats and a “trending news” feed that features links to news stories that are widely shared on the platform.
And even though Meta recently released its own version of The app still defaults to a “for you” algorithmic feed that features a mix of content that users actually want and unrequested nonsense that’s so random and bizarre that it’s been compared to a . (Meta said it would be allowing users to set their next feed as default, but didn’t provide an update.) It’s also telling that even content creators get paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for posting on Threads. the platform.
Even bigger changes are coming in 2025. Although Threads and Bluesky have so far been blissfully ad-free, both services will eventually need to make money.
Bluesky has experimented with other ways to make money so far, including selling custom domains and an upcoming project. which will offer additional features to paying users. Although Graber did not fully publicity, she also made it clear that she did not want “» the service for advertising purposes.
Threads, on the other hand, is already tied to Meta’s multibillion-dollar advertising machine, an entity so intrusive that many people believe the company’s apps to their conversations (a theory that has been argued many times .) Although Zuckerberg has the company is in no rush to turn Threads into a “very large company”, it could see its in January, according to reports, and there’s little reason to believe that Meta won’t eventually use the same playbook that it uses with all of its other services.
All of this makes Bluesky even more of an outsider. Threads is already over 10 times his size and Meta has made it clear he has no problem using his copy-or-kill. against the upstart.
But this is also exactly why so many Bluesky users fervently believe that the platform is the one that “.” While Threads and X entrust public conversations to autocratic billionaires, Bluesky is an independent entity and has structured its platform much more democratically. The platform has had its share of but it gives much more control to its users. It welcomed developers, who created dozens of third-party apps for the service.
All this may ultimately not be enough to fend off Meta, which can afford to spend billions of dollars 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 change the way social media works from the bottom up,” Graber said at a recent press event. “I want us to have a choice about what we see.”
