December 5, 2024
📰 FEATURE STORY
Can Bluesky be X’s decentralised alternative?
Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, rebranded it as X, and had a field day with the platform’s policies, people’s stock in the company’s prospects has soured. His close ties with incoming US President Donald Trump certainly don’t help. Users are heading for the exits.
Where are they going? One place is Bluesky. User numbers have significantly increased since the recent US election. The platform has grown over time but is firmly in the spotlight. Can Bluesky become the next big social media platform?
Context
Two years ago, the billionaire businessman behind Tesla and SpaceX decided to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. The road to close the deal was anything but smooth.
Musk took the company private, and the news cycle hasn’t stopped since. Here’s a handful to refresh your memory – the X rebranding, a new CEO in Linda Yaccarino, advertisers deciding to leave, the Grok chatbot, premium subscriptions and features, relaxed content moderation, and mass layoffs.
As all this was happening, several companies decided to capitalise on the increasing chaos and disillusionment people had with X. A slate of new platforms cropped up, jockeying to be the new alternative. Meta’s Threads became a go-to for some. Mastodon was another one that hung around.
Following the recent US election victory for Trump and Musk in the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), many people decided to leave X for good.
One platform has emerged among others – Bluesky. It’s owned in part by CEO Jay Graber. The project was initially started by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey after he left the company. On the company’s board are Jabber inventor Jeremie Miller, Techdirt founder Mike Masnick and Blockchain Capital general partner Kinjal Shah. As of May 2024, Dorsey was no longer with Bluesky. It’s now an independent public benefit corporation.
The platform was actually developed by Dorsey while he was still Twitter CEO. When he first introduced it in 2019, he said the company was funding a “small independent team” to build a decentralised standard for social media. The goal was for Twitter to adopt this standard in the future.
Bluesky is a decentralised social app with a Twitter-like interface, algorithmic choice, a federated design, and community-specific moderation. The platform uses an open-source in-house framework called the AT Protocol. That means people on the outside can see how it’s built and what’s being developed.
The platform has seen a surge in users over the past month. But can it give platforms like X a run for its money?
VIEW: Good competition
It’s probably a good time to be a social media network upstart. Bluesky is in that position. The platform has nearly 24 million users. That’s up from about 13 million in late October. For context, when the platform debuted in February 2024, it had about 3 million. According to Similarweb, there has been a surge in users. It has surpassed Meta’s Threads in daily web-based visits in the UK and US.
Bluesky has some things going for it. During the recent Thanksgiving break in the US, the platform claimed that engagement overtook Threads and X in some instances, particularly for interactions with certain publications. The platform doesn’t demote links and encourages independent developers to build apps and extensions on top of its network. In a recent blog post, the company cited posts from the team members at the Boston Globe and The Guardian where engagement was several times what they see on Threads.
Bluesky has Musk to thank for its recent user growth. He wants to kill legacy media, and many reporters and media houses aren’t happy. He has attempted to stifle how X has been used to share outside media and boost content from “citizen reporters”. Some of Musk’s policies drove advertisers away, and these so-called “X-pats” are now moving to Bluesky. Journalists and media organisations have to rebuild their following on the new platform. That might’ve been tough initially. The recent increased interest in Bluesky has put those concerns to rest.
COUNTERVIEW: X will dominate
The numbers tell a striking story. X has about 611 million monthly active users. Threads has 275 million. Bluesky is still in the lower double digits. There’s a long way to go, and it’s unclear if it’ll reach the heights of its competitors. Threads is the closest Bluesky could compete with, and even that might be a stretch. For starters, it’s backed by the tech giant Meta. It’s also studying the landscape. It introduced new features like the recently improved search interface for users to look for specific posts with filters like user profiles and date ranges.
While Bluesky is experiencing positive growth, it’s not all good news. On November 27, a substack post from Alexios Mantzarlis from Cornell Tech’s Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative stated that 44% of the top 100 most-followed Bluesky accounts were doppelgängers. The surge in users has also resulted in something predictable, a rise in harmful content. While the platform hopes its expanded moderation team will improve things, delays and the use of AI to moderate content could prove thorny in the long run.
The company’s infrastructure is a double-edged sword. The decentralised nature gives users more control, but it also means everything is catalogued in a public feed. The company also has legal challenges in the European Union (EU). It’s not considered big enough to be labelled a “Very Large Online Platform” under the EU Digital Services Act. However, the European Commission is already worried about its failure to comply with rules for smaller platforms, mainly not reporting accurate user numbers.
Reference Links:
- What is Bluesky? Everything to know about the X competitor – Tech Crunch
- Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge – Platformer
- Musk’s X Strategy Is Driving Journalists And Media Brands To Bluesky – Forbes
- Bluesky Emerges As Traffic Source: Publishers Report 3x Engagement – Search Engine Journal
- Bluesky keeps growing, and so do its problems – The Register
- Think Twice Before Joining Bluesky – Analytics Mag
What is your opinion on this?
(Only subscribers can participate in polls)
a) Bluesky can be the X’s decentralised alternative.
b) Bluesky can’t be the X’s decentralised alternative.
Previous poll’s results:
- Other countries should replicate Australia’s social media ban: 66.7% 🏆
- Other countries shouldn’t replicate Australia’s social media ban: 33.3%
🕵️ BEYOND ECHO CHAMBERS
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Big FDI statements hide the truth. Be careful about which metric to use
For the Left:
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