Threads got all the attention this week but Bluesky may eventually reign supreme as the heir apparent to Twitter.
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter late last year, things have gone from bad to worse at the microblogging site. Many users want out, and they’re hoping that there’s a worthy alternative waiting in the wings. Even if Meta’s newly launched Threads is currently enjoying all the attention, the other major Twitter alternative—Bluesky—is, in many ways, the most obvious heir apparent.
For one thing, Bluesky was created by former Twitter guru Jack Dorsey, with money from Twitter (to the tune of $13 million), and was initially conceptualized when Jack was still running Twitter full-time. Dorsey launched Bluesky in 2019 as a Twitter side-project, then spun the platform off as a public benefit corporation in 2021. Open source and decentralized, Bluesky is supposed to be cut from the same cloth as Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse, though some critics will tell you it’s a different beast entirely. For the past few years, the company has been hiring folks and quietly building up a reputation for itself and, this week, it celebrated a personal growth milestone: an analysis by a data firm showed Bluesky had officially crested one million users. While that might not sound like much next to Threads’ recent exponential growth, it’s actually more than you might think.
What’s impressive about Bluesky’s numbers is that they were arrived at using an invite-only sign-up model. Anybody can currently join Threads, a fact that allowed the Meta app to break download records and net 30 million users in a matter of hours earlier this week.
