Bluesky appears to be using a bold new strategy to attract potential new users: posting in threads. Rival social media services have also joined Threads amid a surge in complaints from users frustrated with Meta’s policies.
Complaints about Meta’s policies are not a new topic, but they have received renewed attention in the past week amid a spike in engagement baiting on the platform and complaints about Threads’ sometimes baffling content moderation decisions. . Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive behind the Threads app, said the company is considering both issues. But in the meantime, there has been more discussion about Bluesky, a decentralized service with a very different philosophy regarding algorithms and moderation.
On Wednesday, Bluesky created an account on Threads and immediately began marketing itself as an alternative platform for people dissatisfied with Meta. The strategy appears to be working. “Bluesky” was the thread’s trending topic for the second day in a row, and “Bluesky vs Meta moderation” was trending on the platform at the time of writing.
“We are not like other girls…we are not owned by billionaires,” Bluesky wrote in a post Thursday. “Your social experience should be one that you customize, not one that bends to the whims of whoever owns the platform.”
Although this isn’t the first time Bluesky has lightly trolled a rival (see that article) ×post Since the beginning of this week), the company has been experiencing real dissatisfaction among Threads users. In addition to complaints about blatant engagement baiting in the feed, users are also questioning Meta’s seemingly aggressive moderation tactics on the thread. Many users say the company already restricts political content on its apps and takes a heavy-handed approach to moderating the service. As The Verge points out, many people have reported that Meta has taken action against posts that used the words “cracker” and “salty.” Social media consultant Matt Navarra has revealed that he was punished for sharing a BBC article about the ‘Goodbye MetaAI’ hoax that went viral online on his thread account.
Bluesky, on the other hand, takes a much more flexible approach to content moderation. This puts most of the decision-making power in the hands of users, allowing them to decide what kind of content they do or don’t want to see, and allowing users to run their own moderation services. “We always do baseline moderation, which means when you visit[Bluesky]we give you a default moderated experience,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graeber said earlier this year. He first told Engadget. “Plus, you can customize it.”
It remains to be seen whether the new focus on Blue Sky will lead to mass defections to the service. According to the dashboard that tracks Bluesky’s growth, Bluesky currently has about 10.8 million users, and while it’s not clear how many new users have arrived in the past few days, given Bluesky’s previous growth, This suggests that there has been a slight spike over the past month. Shortly after X was shut down in Brazil last month, it had about 8.8 million users.
