New Horizons
Bluesky has apparently been such a successful X-former-Twitter alternative that even Mark Zuckerberg is watching it with enthusiasm. At this rate, a social site can run out of Threads – and Meta is clearly not happy.
“The race to replace Twitter has intensified,” Jasmine Enberg, senior analyst at market research firm eMarketer, said. he told The Washington Post. “Threads has been a de facto home for many displaced people [X-formerly-Twitter] users, but the addition of new users to Bluesky after the election has increased competition.”
Stiff Competition
X-former-Twitter, the space giant, has something like 300 million users per month – a number that has been declining since Elon Musk acquired the site in 2022, opening the place for an influx of new opponents.
Currently, Bluesky has more than 22 million users, up from 13 million in October. Threads, in comparison, has about 275 users per month – but it’s hard to shake the idea that Bluesky’s small user base is using the service much more than those on Threads, many of whom are probably signing up because of annoying reminders in Instagram.
The problem is that billionaires Zuckerberg and Musk are reluctant to predict what ordinary people want from the social site – the former design. net-negative AI in all, and the latter makes idiotic decisions like to remove the lock button. Bluesky, minimal as it may be, promises not to use user content for creating AI training, and comes with an excellent block hammer.
This means people are attracted to it, hence Bluesky’s skyrocketing userbase. The meter has already stolen several Bluesky features and introduced them to Threads, letting users curate feeds and prioritize from people they really follow, pulling Threads from the former TikTok-style For You page.
And at the end of the day, there may be no stronger sign of a company’s fear than copying a competitor’s behavior. May the best herosite win.
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