Bluesky and Threads showed us very different visions for a post-X future

There is no longer any doubt that Threads and Bluesky have created the most viable alternatives to the platform once known as Twitter. But while the two services may share some of the same goals, they have shown very different visions of how text-based social networks should operate.

Threads, of course, is controlled by Meta, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. And although the company has claimed to embrace “public conversation,” it has also consistently put its thumb on the scale to encourage certain types of speech over others. The company has throttled “political” content in an election year, forcing users to adjust their settings to enable posts about the election or “social issues” to appear in their “for you” feed.

This desire to limit some of what Meta described as “potentially sensitive” content has also led to some questionable moderation decisions. For months, the app by researching certain topics, including those related to COVID-19 and vaccines. Those limits have since been lifted, but there have been numerous and inexplicable cases of other moderation failures in Threads.

In October, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri admitted that the company had “found errors and made changes” after users reported that their accounts were penalized for using them. such as “saltine” and “cracker”. Earlier this month, Meta’s communications director Andy Stone after users noticed that searches for posts about Austin Tice, the American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, were blocked in the app because the content “may be associated with the sale of drugs.” Stone did not offer an explanation, but said the issue has been addressed.

Bluesky, on the other hand, took less of an above-board approach to moderation. While the company employs some of its own moderators to enforce “basic moderation,” users have a lot of control over how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. Blueksy also allows people to create their own for an even more personalized experience.

“Moderation is in many ways, like governance,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. “And establish the norms of a social space, we do not think that a person or a company should unilaterally decide that for an entire ecosystem where people have important public conversations for the state of the world.”

That philosophy plays out in other important ways. Twitter has never been a of traffic for most publishers, even before Elon Musk took over. But the platform played once in the news ecosystem. At a time when Elon Musk recognized that X and Threads’ top executive said Meta doesn’t want to “encourage” Bluesky leaders have to encourage the sharing of links, and many editors have reported seeing from Bluesky, compared to Threads and X.

But perhaps the most obvious difference between the approach of Meta and Bluesky is in which order the posts appear. Bluesky defaults to a reverse chronological feed that shows posts from the accounts you follow. Users can also choose to add based on hundreds of different topics. For example, I follow a “cat pics” feed that surfaces posts with photos of cats and a “trending news” feed that surfaces links to news that are widely shared on the platform.

And while Meta has recently come out with its own version of the app still defaults to a “for you” feed algorithm that surfaces a mix of content that users actually want and without asking that it’s so random and weird that it’s been compared to a . (Meta said it would be which allows users to make their feed following the default, but did not provide an update.) It is also said that even content creators are paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to post on the Threads. the platform.

There are even more significant changes coming in 2025. While Threads and Bluesky have so far been ad-free, both services will eventually need to make money.

Bluesky has so far experimented with other ways to make money, including selling custom domains and a next one which offers extra features to paying users. Although Graber didn’t entirely advertising, it has also been clear that she does not want “” the service for the end of advertising.

Threads, on the other hand, is already attached to Meta’s multibillion-dollar advertising machine, an entity so intrusive that many people believe that the company’s applications. to their conversations (a theory that has been repeated .) Even Zuckerberg has the company is in no hurry to turn the wires into a “very big business”, it could see its in January, according to reports, and there’s little reason to believe that Meta won’t eventually employ the same playbook it has with all of its other services.

All of this makes Bluesky even more of an underdog. Threads is already more than 10 times its size and Meta has made it clear that it has no problem with its copy-or-kill. against arrival.

But it is also exactly why so many Bluesky users fervently believe that the platform is the one that “.” While Threads and X put public conversations in the hands of autocratic billionaires, Bluesky is an independent entity and has structured its platform much more democratic. The platform has had its share of but it puts much more control in the hands of its users. It welcomes developers, who have created dozens of third-party applications for the service.

All that may not be enough to defend Meta, which can afford to throw billions of dollars at Threads. But Bluesky’s vision for a decentralized open-source platform is about more than becoming the next big social media site. “We decided to fundamentally change the way social media works,” Graber said during a recent press event. “I want us to have a choice about what we see.”