A once-niche platform created by Twitter’s founder is now taking a run at the social media company’s crown.
Driving the news: After seeing its user base increase five-fold in the last two weeks, social media platform Bluesky is getting renewed interest from investors just weeks after closing its initial US$15 million funding round, per Axios.
- The platform is now adding a million users a day — a surge that has coincided with a two-week period that saw the largest exodus of X users since Elon Musk bought it last year.
Catch-up: The appeal of Bluesky is its simplicity and customization. Users can tailor their algorithm to their interests and control their feed, prioritizing accounts they like and muting the ones they don’t.
- As the New York Times put it: “It’s a throwback to a rawer, lower-stakes era of social media, before elections and economies hinged on what happened there.”
Why it matters: Bluesky isn’t just capitalizing on dissatisfaction with X, it’s giving users something that has become novel in today’s social media environment: control over their experience. This user-centric approach is already having a ripple effect on other platforms.
- Threads just rolled out changes last week that give users more control over their algorithm, mirroring the features of its scrappy young competitor.
Yes, but: With 275 million users already on the platform and a pool of over five billion Instagram and Facebook users to convert, Threads is still the largest challenger to X.
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