Bluesky’s rapid growth has once again proven that competition is a good thing

In the recent past, Bluesky has grown significantly. The number of users quickly grew to over 20 million, and at one point it was adding over a million users per day. Between the ban on X in Brazil earlier this year and the results of the 2024 US presidential election, a large group of people have chosen to leave X.

But they don’t choose Meta’s Threads, the more popular X alternative at the time, but rather Bluesky.

Rise of Bluesky

For one reason or another, people prefer Bluesky Threads. It could be because they prefer the look and feel of Bluesky or they simply don’t want to support Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s other social media platform. Whatever the case, Bluesky’s sudden rise apparently scares Meta.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, people have tried a number of Twitter alternatives, including Mastodon, Pebble (formerly T2), Bluesky, Threads, Hive Social, Post.news, and even Tumblr. With all of these options, a number of them were either discontinued entirely or the companies failed to gain popularity – and for a while it looked like Threads would be the only viable alternative. Until now.

Threads had grown to over 200 million users since its launch in July 2023, and Meta probably thought they had this whole “Twitter alternative” game in the bag. While Threads was a viable social media platform, the company definitely hadn’t made a huge effort to actually engage with its users.

For example, I’ve personally never been a fan of the fact that Threads doesn’t allow you to switch your default feed from For You to Follow. Sure, They really wanted you to use “For You.”

Both are no longer the case, as the feed switcher is clearly visible and Threads “tests” the “Follow” option as the default feed.

These are all small features that Threads could have added at any time but chose not to. Now these features are all there, probably to make the platform more attractive.

Copying Bluesky functions

In recent weeks, Threads has also copied a number of Bluesky features, including custom feeds and starter packs. Custom feeds allow you to create a feed of a specific group of people to easily follow a topic or community. Starter packs make it easy to follow a group of people who have everything something together. These two features were key to Bluesky’s growth and made it much easier to curate an engaging feed.

Starter packs aren’t quite available in Threads yet, although the feature has already been discovered by reverse engineers. Custom feeds appear to already be available to all users in Threads.

Competition is a good thing

Ultimately, it is unclear who will ultimately win this race for the “Twitter alternative,” but one thing is clear: Bluesky and Threads are the main competitors here. Ultimately, I don’t care which platform “wins,” but this is the ultimate case of competition being a good thing. Meta suddenly wouldn’t care about implementing all of these important user experience improvements in threads if they didn’t have a reason to.

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