Bluesky, a decentralized social networking company, has joined Threads, a decentralized alternative to X, to attract users frustrated with Meta’s moderation issues
The new company wants to take advantage of the talks on Threads right now, where many users are threatening to leave for Bluesky because of these new problems.
Wednesday, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said that the company was looking into the moderation problems on the network. However, there has been no settlement yet.
Instagram also hasn’t said what happened to people whose Threads posts were moved down and blocked, whose accounts were deleted, or whose accounts were wrongly marked as belonging to people young. But many think the company depends on AI-powered moderation systems that aren’t working right.
It became more popular to leave Threads and join Bluesky. To poke fun at these rumors, Bluesky made an account and wrote to Threads users, “Heard people were talking about us…” That’s why we made an account to share more information!”
In terms of control, the company then reviewed a few key ways that Bluesky differs from Threads. Like other social networks, it has a team of moderators who follow a set of rules for the group. However, Bluesky says that its team won’t lower the rank of political content. This is something that Meta purposely avoided before the U.S. election season, which was very political.
Meta said in February that it would no longer suggest political content on Instagram and Threads. It told users they would only see this content in their feeds if they actively followed political accounts. Many creators were upset about Meta’s decision, and hundreds signed a letter saying that limiting the reach of this material “endangers the reach of marginalized folks speaking to their own lived experience on Meta’s platforms.”
Bluesky also said on Threads that its moderation system differs from other social networks because it has an “open stackable ecosystem” that lets separate groups publish moderation tools that users can subscribe to and use to tailor their feed to their tastes.
The company also discussed how it supports open-source code, account portability, and algorithmic choice. It also gave away one of its starting packs, lists of people to follow on Instagram.
Whether the planned departure from Threads will have a big effect on either social network remains to be seen. Threads may deal with the moderation issues long before there are a lot of exits. People who use Threads can make Bluesky accounts to check it out, but they might not stay because Bluesky is still much smaller than Threads. The first one now has more than 10.7 million people, but the second one has more than 200 million active users monthly.
Some people may choose to stay on Threads even though there are problems right now. Some people do that because they’re still mad that Bluesky was an invite-only social network for so long, and they joke that they’re still waiting for their invite.
Bluesky will still benefit from the feedback it’s getting from users, even if it can’t get a lot of Threads users to switch to its platform like it did when X was banned in Brazil. For example, in the hundreds of comments it’s getting, people are saying that Bluesky’s app needs better threading and to be able to connect to ActivityPub, which runs Mastodon and will soon also run Threads once it fully federates.
Bluesky replied, “We’re reading all of your feedback and making notes,” and gave them a link to download their app.
