Jay Peters, reporting for The Verge:

Bluesky gained more than 700,000 new users in the last week and now has more than 14.5 million users total, Bluesky COO Rose Wang confirmed to The Verge. The “majority” of the new users on the decentralized social network are from the US, Wang says. The app is currently the number two free social networking app in the US App Store, only trailing Meta’s Threads.

People posting on Threads, on the other hand, have raised complaints about engagement bait, moderation issues, and, as of late, misinformation, reports Taylor Lorenz. And like our very own Tom Warren, I’ve come to dislike the algorithmic “For You” feed that you can’t permanently escape, and it certainly seems like we’re not alone in that opinion.

But the Instagram-bootstrapped Threads, which recently crossed 275 million monthly users, is still significantly larger than Bluesky.

Obviously, most of these users joined Bluesky to escape from the state-run propaganda website X, but I wouldn’t discount the influx of Threads refugees either. Here’s how social networks grow: Overwhelming dissatisfaction with a network causes everyone to hunt for another site, and as a select group of well-known posters begins to put time into that network, it creates a party atmosphere there. Suddenly, even if the previous place has more people by number than the new place, it feels barren, and everyone remaining feels left out of the party. This incentivizes more people to move to the new place, causing a new chasm and repeating the cycle. When comparing social networks, don’t look at the number of daily or monthly active users — look at the number of posts that meet a certain engagement threshold or ratio.

Most users on a social network simply like and view posts and move on. It’s tough for us, the nerds, to understand this phenomenon, but it’s true because it’s arduous to amass a considerable following on social media. Most people have no clue what to talk about — they’re just there to have fun. It’s like expecting everyone who enjoys watching YouTube to make YouTube videos themselves. The top 5 percent of writers on Threads or X make up more than 95 percent of the content. Algorithms level the playing field slightly, but as you add more algorithmic juice, it disincentivizes the real creators, which, therefore, lessens engagement drastically. This is because the top 5 percent don’t need diversity, equity, and inclusion for their posts as they’re already well-known — they just want to use a network that ensures their content gets to their followers.

Threads has never met the minimum viable engagement ratio, no matter how many people it has attracted, because it’s built around DEI for small accounts. Like it or not, small accounts — the ones with less than a hundred followers — don’t have much interesting content to provide for the platform. But as I said, the more DEI you add to juice the smaller accounts, the more it disincentivizes larger accounts run by people who just need a URL to publish their ideas. Threads, for example, considerably boosts images, videos, and “engagement bait,” i.e., content made to attract the lowest common denominator users who aren’t thinking about what they’re consuming. That doesn’t inspire true engagement; it just makes the network feel like an echo chamber. It’s been aptly described as a “gas leak” social network because it boosts content people ultimately aren’t interested in at the detriment of the people they are actually following.

Threads took the Instagram approach to a text-based, news-heavy “social network.” I put that in quotes for a reason: Twitter succeeded in the 2010s because it took the idea of Really Simple Syndication and blogs — Google Reader — and expanded it to a much broader audience while adding niceties like image uploads, username mentions, and comments, all at no cost. It was the most economically viable blogging platform. Twitter didn’t start as a social network but as a WordPress competitor that blew up into becoming a social network. The beauty of the open web is that you can choose what you want to see and how you want to see it, and Twitter was simply the yellow pages of the internet: a nice, organized directory of people you’d like to follow with links to their work and anything else they found interesting.

Threads fundamentally failed to grasp this idea. Threads is, at its core, a social network made like Instagram but for text. This is why Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s chief executive, runs it like Instagram and discourages hard news (politics): because it is Instagram. The only catch is that the top 5 percent of Twitter users aren’t interested in using Instagram — they want a blogging platform. Mosseri does not seem to be understanding this well. He wrote:

Separately though, it is remarkable how much of my Threads experience is people talking about Threads, whether it’s feature requests or complaints. It probably makes sense given it’s still new and the world is shifting, but wild.

I don’t understand how this person is the head of two popular social networks without having even the slightest understanding of how algorithms work. The problem with Threads is that there’s no “topic of conversation” each day like there is on X. It’s an information silo, and that is exactly the problem. Mosseri just demonstrated the problem with his own website — it operates like a social network and less like an RSS reader. It only shows each person what they’re interested in when that should be the last objective of a blogging platform. You get to follow what you enjoy, and it should not filter what you see from that list of things you’ve followed. Threads is just not representative of the real world because it immerses everyone in their own little virtual reality headset without showing them the collective ideas of the world, which is what Twitter excelled at. (It’s worth noting that I don’t think it does anymore because, again, X is state-run media.)

Bluesky isn’t perfect, and I don’t think it’s even a very good platform. I much prefer Threads’ client — or even X’s — and Mastodon’s lively third-party app ecosystem. But half of the top 5 percent is on there, creating a lively party atmosphere. I’m there, posting regularly through my custom domain. Many of my friends are on there, too, and I can find them easily through “starter packs,” essentially follower lists made by my other friends. But the top 5 percent is sick of Threads because it’s not interested in being the social network for the people by the people. It’s trying so desperately to be akin to TikTok or Instagram for text, and nobody wants that. It isn’t the features — it’s the mindset that holds Threads back.