Zuckerberg Seems Genuinely Alarmed by the Explosive Growth of Bluesky

Threads, X-formerly-Twitter: beware.

New Horizons 

Bluesky has apparently become such a successful X-formerly-Twitter alternative that even Mark Zuckerberg is anxiously taking notice. At this rate, the social site could potentially outpace Threads — and Meta clearly isn't happy. 

"The race to replace Twitter has accelerated," Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at the market research company eMarketer, told The Washington Post. "Threads has been the de facto home for many displaced [X-formerly-Twitter] users, but the surge of new users to Bluesky after the election has upped the competition."

Stiff Competition 

X-formerly-Twitter, the giant in the space, has something like 300 million active monthly users — a number that's been plummeting ever since Elon Musk acquired the site in 2022, opening up room for a proliferation of new challengers.

Currently, Bluesky has over 22 million users, up from 13 million in October. Threads, in comparison, has around 275 million monthly users — but it's hard to shake the sense that Bluesky's smaller user base is using the service far more obsessively than those at Threads, many of whom are likely signing up because of nagging reminders in Instagram.

The problem is likely that billionaires Zuckerberg and Musk flounder in predicting what normal people want out of a social site — the former drags net-negative AI into everything, and the latter makes idiotic decisions like removing the block button. Bluesky, as little as it may be, at least promises to not exploit user content for generative AI training, and it comes with a pretty powerful block hammer. 

That means people are attracted to it, hence Bluesky's skyrocketing userbase. Meta has already pilfered several Bluesky features and introduced them to Threads, letting users customize feeds and prioritize posts from people they actually follow, pulling Threads away from its previously TikTok-style For You page. 

And at the end of the day, there may be no stronger sign of corporate fear than copycatting a competitor's features. May the best hellsite win. 

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