Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, appears to be scrambling to compete with Bluesky, the Twitter-like social media app that 1 million users a day have been joining to replace X and its owner Elon Musk after the election of President-elect Donald Trump.
Meta's subsidiary, Threads, has seen several tests and new features this week, and Jasmine Enberg, the vice president and principal analyst of eMarketer, tells The Washington Post that the changes are coming while the "race to replace Twitter has accelerated."
"Threads has been the de facto home for many displaced X users, but the surge of new users to Bluesky after the election has upped the competition," she said.
Bluesky's user base remains far smaller than that of X and Threads, but "Meta clearly sees it as a potential threat."
Threads is now promoting custom feeds to give users more control while setting up its algorithm to allow users to see more posts from people they follow.
Bluesky has been compared to Twitter with good reason. It launched as a spin-off from Twitter under its former chief executive Jack Dorsey in 2023 and was open for users only on an invitation-only basis until February.
In recent weeks, it's had some growing pains, as the exodus grew while the company had just 20 employees to handle site outages, code problems, and moderating content. But on Thursday, the company said it has resolved the issues.
Threads, meanwhile, announced Wednesday it added custom feeds, allowing users to switch between their main feed and special feeds they can build around their topics of interest, echoing Bluesky's encouragement for users to create their own feeds and subscribe to other users' feeds.
"This is the kind of competition and innovation that's been missing from social for the last decade because progress has been locked within tech giants," Bluesky noted on its official Threads account.
Instagram and Threads chief Adam Mosseri said Thursday the Meta-owned platform changed its algorithm to prioritize content from the people users follow, also making the site more like Bluesky than other competitors Instagram Reels or TikTok.
But Meta spokesperson Seine Kim said that Threads regularly rolls out new features "to support the now over 275 million Threads users. And we'll continue to share more as we work to serve this growing community."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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