Bluesky is Now Courting Threads Users

Threads, the Twitter/X clone launched by the Instagram team last year is enjoying some good momentum as it recently crossed 200 million monthly users worldwide. Bluesky, another decentralized social network that aims to welcome disenchanted Twitter users is now trying to spread its message by capitalizing on Threads’ success.

Earlier this week, the Bluesky team created a Threads account and posted a series of messages that caught users’ attention. Bluesky actually took advantage of multiple reports from high-profile users on Threads who complained about the app’s strange moderation rules.

As an example, the former technology journalist Walt Mossberg, who has close to 50K followers on Threads, claimed that his engagement on the platform had “plunged to zero or near zero” over a period of 24 hours. “It’s as if the algorithm has downgraded me to the point that my followers aren’t even seeing the posts. The topics are things like urging people to vote, or discussing the state of journalism.. I have received no warnings,” Mossberg posted.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri replied to Mossberg and acknowledged the “remarkably low” engagement on his posts, adding that he asked the Threads team to “look into it.” In the same timeframe, the Bluesky team posted a thread on Threads to detail how moderation works on the platform. “Note that we don’t de-rank content just because it’s about politics. in fact, we welcome news, politics, and other important conversations,” the team posted.

This week, the Bluesky team also used Threads to share some tips on how to get started on Bluesky, how to get more engagement, and more. The company also emphasized its decentralized structure and more extensive customization options, with the app recently introducing a new theme font, adjustable font sizing, and the ability to pin posts on top of profiles.

Bluesky also couldn’t resist to engage in some strange trolling this week. “We’re not like the other girls… we’re not owned by a billionaire,” the team wrote on Threads yesterday. Of course, this the post that got the most engagement on the Bluesky Threads account with close to 500 comments as of this writing.

If Bluesky somewhat replicates the Twitter experience from the early days, the platform is still much smaller than its competitors with just over 10 millions users as of September. It does seem to be getting more traction than Mastodon, which also announced a refreshed experience earlier this week designed to make the platform more intuitive for newcomers. However, Mark Zuckerberg said last year said that he believed Threads had a “good chance” of being the next Meta platform to cross one billion users in a few years. With Threads being deeply integrated with Instagram, there’s a good change for that to actually happen.