Why, Despite the Numbers, Bluesky Feels Bigger than Threads

Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads is significantly bigger than Bluesky (even as Bluesky crosses the 20 million user mark). It feels quite a lot smaller, though, which contributes to why a lot of people prefer Bluesky over Threads. But why does it feel that way?

A common answer is “Threads suppresses news and political content, so it doesn’t get traction.” That might be part of it, but I don’t think that’s the whole, or even main, story. Rather, Threads has a unique approach to community. One way to think about it is that Threads is trying to build a fundamentally different approach to social media and the social media experience from what Twitter was and what Bluesky aims to be. Because what it’s building is quite novel, and also not clearly articulated by Threads’ leadership, it gets interpreted not as a worthy approach—even if one not for everyone—but instead as failure to accomplish the end of being a successful Twitter alternative.

The Old Twitter and New Bluesky Approach

Bluesky has an algorithmic feed, where posts are ranked on various metrics and shown out of order, and which includes posts from people you don’t follow. In fact, it has a lot of them and lets you build your own.

But Bluesky doesn’t default you to an algorithmic feed, and my sense is most people there don’t spend much time in them. Instead, Bluesky is primarily a chronological feed, showing you everything from everyone you follow (and everything they repost), ordered by time and date. Threads does the opposite. It has a chronological feed, but it doesn’t really want you to use it, because it makes accessing it somewhat opaque, and insists on switching you back to the algorithmic “For You” feed quite often. Threads want you using its algorithmic feed, and seeing what it thinks you want to see.

Old social networks, such as Twitter in its heyday, were built around vitality. If something got popular, the algorithm made it more popular. Chronological feeds produce a similar result, because the way you see things from outside of your following network is when the people you follow repost (or retweet) it. The more a post is seen, the more likely it is to be reposted, and the more likely other people are to see it. Bluesky works in a similar way.

In practice this means that, while there are niche communities on the platform, the experience of using it feels more like being a part of one big community. This is how, for example, Twitter was able to be a driver of the broader culture, while not being huge itself in terms of active user numbers. What was happening on Twitter, everyone on Twitter was talking about. And many of the people most active there were influential outside of Twitter.

Threads goes in the other direction.

The Threads Approach

The Threads algorithm is anti-viral. Rather than showing you what’s popular, it figures out, pretty narrowly, what topics (it thinks) you’re interested in, and shows you people talking about those. It rarely brings you posts outside of that handful of topics. The result is that, while Twitter (and Bluesky) feel/felt like everyone together in one room, Threads feels like a ton of smaller, barely overlapping rooms, and you’re in only a few of them.

Threads is at least an order of magnitude larger, in terms of people using it on a regular basis, than Bluesky. But the Threads experience feels much smaller because using Threads is like hanging out in a much smaller network, or a handful of very small networks. Most of those hundreds of millions of users are invisible to you. They might as well not even be on Threads at all in terms of any particular user’s experience.

That’s not bad. It’s an interesting and, for many, appealing approach to social media. There’s a reason Discord communities are so popular, and why web forums were before them. People like being in smaller communities of narrowly shared interests. It’s a reasonable way to approach a social media platform, and clearly one that lots of people, given Threads’ user numbers, quite like.

But if you’re looking instead for “the discourse,” for that old school Twitter sense of being in one big conversation and where your remarks into that conversation can blow up and go viral and gain you a ton of followers across the network, you’re going to prefer Bluesky. Neither approach is better than the other. They’re different. And, with Twitter’s fall, we’re in a time when such experimentation in the basic structure of social media can happen to a degree Twitter’s dominance of its niche had prior prevented from getting much traction.