There is no longer any doubt that Threads and Bluesky have created the most viable alternative to the platform once known as Twitter. But while the two services may have the same goals, they have demonstrated very different views on how text-based social networks should work.
Threads is, of course, controlled by Meta, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. And while the company says it supports “public discourse,” it also consistently puts its thumb on the scale to reward certain types of speech over others. The company has limited “political” content during the election year, forcing users to adjust their settings so that posts about the election or “social issues” appear in their “for you” feed.
This desire to restrict any content that Meta called “potentially sensitive” has also led to some questionable moderation decisions. For several months the application from searching for some topics, including those related to COVID-19 and vaccines. These restrictions have since been lifted, but there have been numerous and unexplained cases of other moderation failures in threads.
In October, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri admitted that the company had “found errors and made changes” after users reported their accounts had been penalized for using such as “salty pancakes” and “crackers”. Earlier this month Meta communications director Andy Stone after users noted that searches for posts about Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, were blocked on the app because the content “may be related to drug sales.” Stone gave no explanation but said the problem had been resolved.
Bluesky, on the other hand, does not take a top-down approach to moderation. Although the company employs its own moderators to provide “basic moderation,” users have a lot of control over how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. Blueksy also allows people to create their own for an even more personalized experience.
“Moderation is a lot like governance,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. “And in setting the norms for social space, we don't think that one person or one company should unilaterally decide this 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 existed traffic for most publishers, even before Elon Musk came to power. But the platform once played in the news ecosystem. At the time Elon Musk admitted that X and a Threads executive said Meta doesn't want to “encourage” Bluesky leaders to facilitate link exchanges, and several publishers have reported seeing from Bluesky compared to Threads and X.
But perhaps the most obvious difference between the Meta and Bluesky approaches is the order in which the messages appear. By default, Bluesky uses a reverse chronological feed that displays posts from accounts you follow. Users can also add based on hundreds of different topics. For example, I follow the “cat photos” feed, which displays posts featuring photos of cats, and the “trending news” feed, which displays links to news stories that are widely shared on the platform.
And although Meta recently released its own version the app still uses an algorithmic “for you” feed that displays a mixture of content that users actually want and unsolicited nonsense so random and bizarre that it has been compared to . (Meta said it would be allows users to make their feed default, but does not provide updates.) Also suggests that even content creators are paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to post in topics. platform.
In 2025, even more significant changes will occur. While both Threads and Bluesky have gone ad-free so far, both services will eventually have to make money.
Bluesky has so far experimented with other ways to make money, including selling custom domains and an upcoming project. which will offer additional features to paying users. Although Graber is not quite yet advertising, she also made it clear that she did not want to “» Service for the sake of advertising.
On the other hand, Threads is already connected to the multibillion-dollar advertising machine Meta, an organization so intrusive that many people believe that the company's applications to their conversations (a theory that has been confirmed repeatedly .) Although Zuckerberg has the company is in no hurry to turn Threads into a “very large business.” in January, according to reports, and there's little reason to believe that Meta won't eventually use the same design as all of its other services.
All this makes Bluesky an even weaker player. Threads is already more than 10 times its size, and Meta has made it clear that it has no problem using the copy or destroy function. against the upstart.
But that's why so many Bluesky users fervently believe that this platform is “” While Threads and X place public discourse in the hands of autocratic billionaires, Bluesky is an independent organization and structures its platform in a much more democratic way. The platform got its share but it puts much more control in the hands of its users. Developers who have created dozens of third-party applications for the service are welcome.
All of 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 a decentralized, open-source platform is about more than just becoming the next big social network. “We set out to change the way social media works from the bottom up,” Graber said during a recent press conference. “I want us to have a choice about what we see.”