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    • Meta scrambles to respond to the rise of social platform Bluesky
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    Meta scrambles to respond to the rise of social platform Bluesky

    Pabio Posted on

    Will Oremus, Naomi Nix
    | Washington Post

    At Bluesky, the social media startup that’s adding 1 million users a day since X owner Elon Musk won his all-out bet on President-elect Donald Trump, the company’s 20 full-time employees company are having difficulty maintaining the site. moderated and its servers operational.

    It’s not the only company in trouble. Meta, the social media giant behind Facebook and Instagram, last week launched a series of tests, tweaks and new features for its own X rival, Threads. Several of them seemed designed to fend off Bluesky’s threat to its status as a leading alternative for people disenchanted with X.

    “The race to replace Twitter has accelerated,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer, a market research firm. “Threads is the de facto home of many displaced X users, but the influx of new users on Bluesky after the election has intensified competition.”

    “While BlueSky’s user base is still only a fraction of Threads’,” she added, “Meta clearly sees it as a potential threat.”

    Meta, the industry’s largest player, responds quickly to newcomers, adapting by integrating popular features, just as it has done in the past with competitors such as Snapchat and TikTok.

    Threads is now promoting Bluesky-like “personalized feeds” that give users more control and has readjusted its core algorithm to feature more posts from people you follow. This feature echoes Bluesky’s approach of encouraging users to create their own feeds and subscribe to feeds created by others, including many that provide real-time political news and commentary – a area that Threads sought to minimize.

    While Threads remains the most popular . The whirlwind of activity has given it a degree of momentum and buzz that social media newcomers rarely achieve in an industry dominated for the past decade by Meta and a handful of other industry heavyweights .

    The explosive growth led to service outages earlier this week, which Bluesky announced Thursday it had resolved. Launched as a spin-off from Twitter under former CEO Jack Dorsey, the company has since severed ties with the billionaire and is now majority-owned by his employees, including CEO Jay Graber, 33.

    Meta took note. Over the past 10 days, the company has touted its own growth while announcing tweaks to Threads that reflect key Bluesky features.

    The Threads “custom feeds” feature announced Wednesday allows users to easily switch between their main feed and special feeds built around topics or people of interest. This echoes Bluesky’s approach of encouraging users to create their own feeds and subscribe to feeds created by others.

    “This is the kind of competition and innovation that has been lacking in social over the past decade as progress has been confined to tech giants,” Bluesky noted on his official Threads account.

    On Thursday, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, said the app had changed the algorithm that determines what users see in their feeds to “prioritize content from people you follow.” It also makes Threads more like Bluesky and less like Instagram Reels or TikTok, which offer personalized recommendations of content shared mostly by strangers.

    Meta’s steps to leaving Bluesky come from a familiar playbook. In 2016, Instagram launched Stories, ephemeral posts that disappear after 24 hours, after a similar feature became popular among Snapchat users. In 2020, the company launched Reels, a short-form video product designed to compete with the ascendant popularity of rival TikTok.

    Antitrust watchdogs have long accused Meta of relying on a “copy-acquire-kill” strategy to unfairly fend off rivals and consolidate its dominance on social media. A federal judge ruled earlier this month that a lawsuit filed by the U.S. government aimed at forcing Meta to break away from Instagram and WhatsApp can go to trial.

    In this case, however, Meta and Bluesky are still searching for the biggest X. Although the company declined to comment or share user statistics, Musk said Thursday on new heights of use, because it is by far the biggest X”. the most interesting place on the Internet.

    When asked if Threads’ latest initiatives were inspired by Bluesky’s success, Meta spokesperson Seine Kim said: “We regularly roll out new features and updates to Threads – dozens over the course of the year. from the last few months alone – to support Threads’ more than 275 million users. And we will continue to share more as we work to serve this growing community.

    Instagram has played a crucial role in Threads’ growth, inviting its more than 2 billion users to sign up for Threads and automatically follow the same accounts they follow on Instagram. But last week, Mosseri said Threads would no longer import users’ Instagram connections, saying internal testing showed people preferred to create new communities on Threads.

    Bluesky’s recent acceleration is reminiscent of the early success of Threads, which Meta created last year with a small engineering team of fewer than 60 people in less than seven months. The app attracted more than 100 million users in its first five days, including well-known celebrities and politicians.

    Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global affairs at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said Bluesky’s rise can be seen in part as a response to Trump’s election, comparing it to the rise of Conservative sites such as Truth Social following Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

    “The most widely used platform for political expression, , he said.

    X did not respond to a request for comment.

    David Carroll, associate professor at Parsons School of Design, said it was “refreshing to observe how new entrants can compete with incumbents”, even if it means “there is no longer a single dominant platform” which presents itself as a public square. .

    – – –

    Cristiano Lima-Strong contributed to this report.

    Pabio
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