In the recent past, Bluesky has been growing substantially. It quickly grew to over 20 million users, and at one point the service was adding over a million users per day. Between the ban on X in Brazil earlier this year, as well as the results of the 2024 US presidential election – large numbers of people chose to leave X.

But they don’t go for Meta’s Threads, the most popular X alternative at the time – they go for Bluesky instead.

The advent of blue skies

For some reason people choose Bluesky over Threads. This could be because they prefer the look of Bluesky, or simply don’t want to support another social media platform owned by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Regardless, Bluesky’s sudden rise seems to scare Meta.

There are a number of Twitter alternatives that people have tried using since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, including Mastodon, Pebble (formerly T2), Bluesky, Threads, Hive Social, Post.news and even Tumblr. Between all of these options, a number of them either shut down completely or the companies failed to gain traction – and for quite a while, it seemed like Threads was going to be the only viable alternative. Until now.

Threads had over 200 million users since its launch in July 2023, and Meta probably thought it had this whole “alternative to Twitter” game in the bag. While Threads is a viable social media platform, the company certainly hasn’t put much effort into actually meeting the needs of its users.

For example, I’ve personally never been a fan of how Threads doesn’t let you change your default feed from For You to Next. Of course, They really wanted you to use For You.

Now both of those things are no longer the case, with the stream switcher displayed prominently, and Threads is “testing” the option to set Follow 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 Features

In recent weeks, Threads has also copied a number of features from Bluesky, including custom feeds and starter packs. Custom feeds allow you to create a feed for a specific group of people, making it easy for you to follow a topic or community. Starter packs allow you to easily follow a group of people who all have something in common. These two features have been essential to Bluesky’s growth and have made it much easier to create an engaging feed.

Starter packs are not yet available on Threads, although the feature is already available. been discovered by reverse engineers. Custom feeds are already live on Threads for all users, apparently.

Competition is a good thing

Ultimately, it’s unclear who will ultimately win this “Twitter alternative” race, but one thing is clear: Bluesky and Threads are the leading contenders here. Ultimately, I don’t care which platform “wins”, but this is an ultimate case where competition is a good thing. Meta wouldn’t suddenly bother implementing all these key user experience improvements on Threads if they had no reason to do so.

Follow Michel: X/Twitter, Blue sky, Instagram