Meta loses ground to Bluesky as users abandon Elon Musk’s X

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Meta’s Threads is losing ground to social media start-up Bluesky in capitalizing on the exodus of users from Elon Musk’s X following Donald Trump’s election.

Since election day, app usage of Bluesky in the US and UK has skyrocketed by nearly 300 percent to 3.5 million. daily users, according to data from the research group Similarweb. The site got a boost when academics, journalists and left-wing politicians abandoned X, whose billionaire owner is a prominent supporter of the president-elect.

Before November 5, Threads had five times more daily active users in the US than Bluesky, which has just 20 full-time employees and was originally funded by Twitter when Jack Dorsey was its CEO. Now, Threads is only 1.5 times the size of its rival, Similarweb said.

Bluesky’s growth in the US and UK comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to deliberately reduce the prominence of political content across its apps, including Facebook and Instagram.

That move was widely interpreted as an attempt to stand up for the partisan budget and avoid being drawn into debates about free speech. Trump, who has long criticized social media platforms for allegedly censoring conservative voices, previously called Meta “an enemy of the people” and threatened Zuckerberg with prison if he were to return to office. Last month, Trump said he liked Zuckerberg “a lot better now” because he “stayed out of the election.”

This contrasts with X, which under Musk’s ownership has cut content moderation to allow more freewheeling content to proliferate.

Since launching last July, Threads has prioritized engaging content from accounts users didn’t follow, a model closer to its photography app Instagram. However, Meta withdrew that choice on Thursday.

This week, it also quickly rolled out the ability for users to curate “custom feeds” around topics or people they want to follow, mimicking existing Bluesky features, after testing the feature for just five days.

The moves sparked speculation that Meta was trying to slow Bluesky’s progress.

Meta said: “We’re regularly rolling out new Threads features and updates — dozens in the past few months alone — to serve the now over 275 million Threads users. And we’ll continue to share more as we work to serve this growing society.”

Experts noted that the Threads timeline was not effective for people seeking content about real-time events.

“There’s this moment here where they’re going to have to make this decision whether to bring back political content and real-time (conversation),” said Katie Harbath, a former political director who worked on Meta’s election strategy for a decade. “Especially if those Bluesky numbers stay up.”

Adam Tinworth, a lecturer in journalism at City St George’s, University of London, described Bluesky as “essentially a Twitter spin-off” and thus a “natural replacement” for those disillusioned with X.

“Wire is a very different proposition (and) completely botched it during the US election because it pushed news and politics out of the feed,” he said.

Bluesky was unveiled by Dorsey in 2019 with the goal of developing a single standard or protocol upon which social platforms and other developers could build more customized offerings.

Now led by digital rights activist and software engineer Jay Graber, users can send short messages and images in an interface similar to X. Growth has been aided by a new feature called “starter packs,” which allow users to follow curated groups of accounts of users with the click of a button.

However, the platform has also suffered from increased outages and errors as it grows rapidly, with questions about how it will create a working business model in the future. Originally funded by Twitter, it raised $15 million in venture funding last year and $8 million the year before.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Threads, said last week that the app had received “more than 15 million sign-ups in November alone and (was) running for three months with more than a million sign-ups a day”. But he added: “Now we have a lot more work to do.”