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Meta’s Threads is losing ground to social media startup Bluesky, capitalizing on the exodus of users from Elon Musk’s X after President Donald Trump’s election.
Since election day, Bluesky’s app usage in the US and UK has surged by almost 300 percent, to 3.5 million daily users, according to data from research group Similarweb. The site gained momentum as academics, journalists and left-wing politicians abandoned Mr. X, with its billionaire owner a prominent supporter of the president-elect.
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Prior to Nov. 5, Threads had only 20 daily active users in the U.S., a full-time staff of just 20, and was originally funded by Twitter when Jack Dorsey was CEO. It was 5 times as much as the Bluesky I was receiving. Currently, Similarweb says Threads is only 1.5 times the size of its competitors.
BlueSky’s growth in the US and UK comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg intentionally reduced the prominence of political content across his apps, including Facebook and Instagram. This is after selecting .
The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to settle partisan disputes and avoid getting drawn into a debate over free speech. Trump has long accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices, and previously branded Mehta an “enemy of the people” and threatened to jail Zuckerberg if he returned to office. There is also. President Trump said last month that “things are much better now” because Zuckerberg is “not in the election.”
This is in contrast to X, under Musk’s ownership, which has cut back on content moderation to allow more freewheeling content to proliferate.
Since its launch last July, Threads has prioritized engaging content from accounts users don’t follow, a model similar to the company’s photo app Instagram. But Mehta withdrew that choice on Thursday.
Also this week, after just five days of testing, it quickly rolled out a feature that lets users curate “custom feeds” around topics and people they want to follow, mimicking an existing Bluesky feature.
The move sparked speculation that the meta was trying to cap Bluesky’s rise.
Meta says: “To serve more than 275 million Threads users today, we regularly roll out new Threads features and updates—dozens in the past few months alone. We will continue to share more to serve our growing community.”
Experts note that thread timelines are not effective for people looking for real-time event content.
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“This is a moment where we have to decide whether to bring back political content and real-time (conversations),” said Katie Harvath, a former policy director who worked on election strategy for Meta for 10 years. “Especially if Blue Sky’s numbers continue like this.”
Adam Tinworth, a journalism lecturer at City St George’s, University of London, said Bluesky was “essentially a spin-off of Twitter” and a “natural replacement” for people disillusioned with X. .
“Threads was a completely different proposition and was completely rejected during the US election because it removed news and politics from the feed,” he said.
Bluesky was announced by Dorsey in 2019 with the goal of developing a single standard or protocol that would allow social platforms and other developers to build more customized services.
Now led by digital rights activist and software engineer Jay Graeber, it allows users to post short messages and images in an interface very similar to X. A new feature called “Starter Packs” that allows users to follow groups of accounts is driving growth. Handpicked by users at the click of a button.
But as the platform has grown rapidly, it has also been plagued by an increasing number of outages and glitches, raising questions about how to build a business model that will work in the future. Initially funded by Twitter, it raised $15 million in venture funding last year and $8 million the year before.
Adam Mosseri, head of Threads, said last week that the app had “more than 15 million sign-ups in November alone, with over 1 million sign-ups per day for three months.” Ta. But he added: “Right now we have a lot of work to do.”
