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.
Mehta’s desire to limit what he described as “potentially sensitive” content also led to some questionable moderation decisions. For several months, the app has not allowed users to search for some topics, 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 the company was “correcting mistakes” after users reported their accounts were penalized for using common words like “salty” and “cracker.” “I found it and made the changes.” Earlier this month, Mehta’s communications director Andy Stone said searches for posts about Austin Tice, the American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, showed that the content “may be related to drug sales.” He apologized after a user pointed out that he was being blocked on the app because of this. ” 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 create their own moderation services for an even more custom experience.
“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. We think so.
This philosophy is utilized in other important ways as well. Even before Elon Musk bought it, Twitter wasn’t a major source of traffic for most publishers. However, the platform once played an important role in the news ecosystem. Even as Elon Musk admits X penalizes linked posts and Threads’ top exec says Meta doesn’t want to “encourage” hard news, Bluesky leaders say Several publishers have reported that they are actually trying to encourage link sharing. You will get significantly more traffic from Bluesky compared to Threads and X.
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 add custom feeds 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 announced its own version of custom feeds, the app still defaults to an algorithmic “made for you” feed that separates content users actually want from content that’s too random and weird. , a combination of nonsense that the user did not ask for. Gas leak. (Meta said it would test allowing users to default to the feed they follow, but did not provide an update.) You can also earn hundreds or even thousands of dollars for posting on Threads. It’s also telling that even the content creators who are getting paid don’t really understand how it works. platform.
More important changes will occur in 2025. Both Threads and Bluesky have been happily ad-free so far, but both services need to make money eventually.
BlueSky has previously experimented with other ways to make money, including selling custom domains and an upcoming subscription service that would provide additional features to paying users. Graeber hasn’t completely eliminated advertising, but he has also made it clear that he doesn’t want to “monetize” the service for advertising.
Threads, on the other hand, is already part of Meta’s multibillion-dollar ad machine and is so intrusive that many believe the company’s app is literally listening in on conversations ( This theory has been proven wrong many times). Reports say there is no rush to turn Threads into a “very large business,” with the first ads likely to run in January, and believe Meta won’t ultimately adopt the same strategy. Same goes for all other services for little reason.
All of this makes Bluesky even more of an underdog. The thread size is already more than 10 times that size, and Meta has made it clear that it’s OK to use copy-or-kill tactics against startups.
But that’s also why so many Bluesky users fervently believe this is the platform that “has the magic.” 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. The platform has some controversy over moderation, but it puts much more control in the hands of users. We welcome developers who have created a number of third-party apps for the service.
Ultimately, that 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.”
