Bluesky might end up defeating Twitter once and for all

In the war for disaffected users of the platform once known as Twitter, Bluesky has had a great week. The decentralized social network has added at least 1 million users in about the past seven days. That growth is the latest point on a trend line: When Elon Musk either degrades X’s usability or makes news for one right-wing political maneuver or another, people look for an exit hatch from his platform. In October, Bluesky added 500,000 users in a day after Musk blunted X’s “block” feature. Bluesky also grew lots when Musk said (so far without following through) in September 2023 that his site would put up a paywall. It also got a big influx when Musk fought with Brazil’s supreme court in August.

Bluesky has not exactly won the Twitter Wars. By conventional metrics, it has not come close. The platform reports about 14.5 million total users. Meta’s Threads, which it built on the scaffolding of Instagram, reports 275 million in any given month. But the Twitter Wars are really a series of small border skirmishes, and Bluesky has momentum in a major battle: the one for news and live events.

Threads, like Musk’s X, is hostile to both news organizations and news as a concept. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri made clear from the moment of Threads’ launch in the fall of 2023 that the platform would not be friendly to news and politics. Meta has seen to that over the past year. It is seemingly impossible to get the Threads app to remain in a setting where a user only sees posts from accounts they choose to follow. External links do not travel well in the site’s algorithmic feeds. To the extent Threads is a home for “news,” it is because it is a nexus for the weirdest liberal election conspiracy theories out there. Threads is doing well with politically vapid influencers and people who understandably just want to try out an app that is connected to their Instagram account. It is a black hole for the exchange of news.