Bluesky and Threads showed us very different visions of the post-X future

There is no longer any doubt that Threads and Bluesky have created the most viable alternatives to the platform formerly known as Twitter. But while the two services may share some of the same goals, they have shown very different insights into how text-based social networks work.

Topics, of course, are controlled by Meta, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Although the company claimed to embrace “general conversation,” it consistently put its thumb on the scale for encouraging certain types of speech over others. The company restricted “political” content in an election year, forcing users to adjust their settings to enable posts about the election or “social topics” to appear in their “For You” feed.

This desire to limit any of what Meta described as “potentially sensitive” content has also led to some questionable moderation decisions. For several months, app From searching for certain topics, including those related to the Corona virus and vaccines. These limits have since been lifted, but there have been numerous and inexplicable instances of other thread moderation failures.

In October, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri admitted that the company “found errors and made changes” after users reported their accounts were being penalized for using the app. Such as “salts” and “crackers.” Earlier this month, Meta’s Director of Communications, Andy Stone After users noticed 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 did not provide an explanation but said the problem had been addressed.

Plosky, on the other hand, took a less moderate, top-down approach. While the company employs some of its own moderators to enforce “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 files For a more personalized experience.

“Moderation is like governance in a lot of ways,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. “By setting the parameters for the social space, we don’t believe that one person or one company should unilaterally decide that 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 never was of traffic for most publishers, even before Elon Musk’s acquisition. But the platform was played once In the news ecosystem. At the time when Elon Musk admitted that X Top Threads executives have said that Meta doesn’t want to “encourage” Bluesky’s leaders did To boost link sharing, many publishers have reported their vision From Bluesky, compared to Threads and X.

But perhaps the most noticeable difference between Meta and Bluesky’s approach is the order in which posts appear. Bluesky defaults to a reverse timeline feed that shows posts from accounts you follow. Users can also choose to add Based on hundreds of different topics. For example, I follow the “Photos of Cats” feed, which displays posts containing photos of cats, and the “Trending News” feed, which displays links to news stories that are widely shared on the platform.

And while Meta recently came out with its own version of By default, the app still uses a “For You” algorithm feed that displays a mix of content that users actually want and unwanted nonsense that is so random and weird that it has been compared to… . (Mita said he would do that Allow users to make their next feed the default, but didn’t provide an update.) It’s also clear that even content creators get paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to post on threads The platform.

There are more significant changes coming in 2025. While both Threads and Bluesky are ad-free so far, both services will need to make money eventually.

Bluesky has so far tried other ways to make money, including selling custom domains and upcoming domains That will provide additional features to paying users. Although Graber didn’t quite do that Advertisement, she was also clear that she didn’t want to“Service for advertising.

Threads, on the other hand, is actually tied to the multibillion-dollar Meta advertising machine, an entity so intrusive that many people believe the company’s apps of their conversations (a theory that has been repeated over and over again .) Even though Zuckerberg has The company is in no rush to turn Threads into a “very big company,” but it can see it coming in January, according to reports, and there’s little reason to believe that Meta won’t end up using the same playbook it uses with all its other services.

All of this makes Bluesky even more of an underdog. The threads are already more than 10 times their size and Meta has shown that they have no problem using copy or kill Against the novice.

But this is also exactly why many Bluesky users strongly believe that the platform is the one that ““While Threads and but it puts more control in the hands of its users. It has welcomed developers who have created dozens of third-party applications for the service.

All of this may not ultimately be enough to fend off Meta, which could spend billions of dollars on Threads. But Bluesky’s vision for a decentralized, open source platform is about much more than just becoming the next big social media site. “We set out to change the way social media works from the bottom up,” Graber said during a recent press event. “I want us to have a choice about what we see.”