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Every day on the site formerly known as Twitter, people post long goodbyes to their followers and instructions on how to find them in “the other place“.

They are of course referring to Bluesky.

But even though their fortunes are linked, Bluesky’s director of operations, Rose Wang, bristles at the constant comparisons.

“People just think we’re some sort of alternative to Twitter, but that’s really not the case,” she says. The Independent. “It would be like calling 1950s television the same thing as YouTube.”

The similarities, however, are hard to avoid. Bluesky started as a project within Twitter in 2019 and was spun off into a separate company by founder Jack Dorsey two years later. The look and feel of the site is almost the same as X. Squint and you would be forgiven for getting it wrong.

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For a growing number of users, however, there is one crucial difference: Bluesky is not run by a megalomaniac billionaire determined to bend the world to his will.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, millions of longtime users have abandoned the site in anger over its rightward shift and increasingly poor user experience. Musk laid off about 80 percent of his staff, amplified right-wing viewpointsdeleted guarantees that protected against hate speech and misinformation, restored extremist narratives and neo-Nazis (and Trump), and forbidden critical journalists.

After attracting. The company saw about a million users per day join, for several days, amid furor over Elon Musk’s support for Trump’s campaign. Some 115,000 users deactivated their accounts on X during the same period, the largest mass exit ever from the platform.

By next year, according to analysts at a digital research firm eMarketerMusk’s takeover will have cost X some 7 million users.

Instagram’s Threads has been considered the preferred alternative for a while and still has more users – but Bluesky now with momentum.

Wang thinks the reason Bluesky is on the rise while others are stagnant is a matter of control. Bluesky does not have an overarching algorithm that controls what people see. If X is the town square, where the loudest voices drown out everyone else, then Bluesky is a party you chose to attend with guests similar to you.

Users can create lists of people to follow based on a topic or interest, block accounts and certain types of posts, and adopt custom timeline filters. All of these controls aim to create a more social and less toxic environment.

“It actually lends itself to much more prosocial behavior,” Wang says. “We are used to being trapped in an algorithm controlled by a small group of people. This is no longer the case and our users have created over 50,000 different feeds, such as different cat feeds or Taylor Swift feeds, or even F1 feeds. And these feeds essentially provide more comfortable corners for people with similar interests to meet.

Still, Bluesky faces big challenges in surpassing cultural and political.

It’s not entirely clear whether Bluesky even wants to be that kind of place. For now, it seems torn between becoming the world’s new chat room and a place where people gather in smaller numbers and based on their interests.

“I think it’s a false dichotomy,” Wang responds on this subject. “It’s like asking people offline: Do you only live with family, or do you also have other friends and participate in a global world?”

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“A global stage is a community, but you and your friend are also a community, and so we give you the ability to expand that community in concentric circles however you want,” she adds.

Bluesky hopes to be able to offer specific benefits to the same journalists and media companies that have fueled Twitter’s growth. Concretely, this means more engagement and more traffic.

“You’re trying to attract people to what’s happening elsewhere, and this hall is where you can experience that.” That’s not how other platforms work, where they’re walled gardens and incentives to keep you locked in,” Wang says.

Wang notes that Bluesky’s business model allows it to be more liberal in letting people leave the site. The company’s CEO, Jay Graber, has pledged not to “enrich the network with ads” and Wang sings a similar tune, noting that they want people to go explore the links and read stories elsewhere, in using Bluesky as a distribution channel.

But if the business model is not centered on advertising, how does it plan to make money?

Wang points to a press release that mentions a subscription model “for features like uploading higher quality videos or profile customization like avatar colors and frames.”

In the meantime, Wang says Bluesky isn’t just waiting for Musk to say something toxic to grow its user base. People join for a variety of reasons, hundreds of thousands signed up during the Threads event. moderation issuesFor example.

Wang attributes the alternatives to “underlying discontent.”

“In general, you’ve had a really bad time, you’ve been unhappy and that’s something that puts you on notice,” she said. “That’s what we’re seeing now. People feel like they’ve been living in toxic spaces for a long time. They consume more content than they actually generate and they simply don’t make friends anymore.