At the same time that more and more people are complaining about Meta’s moderation practices, the competing app has been trending on Threads.
It appears that Bluesky has initiated a daring new tactic to attract potential new users, and that technique is posting on Threads. Threads was joined by the competing social networking service in the midst of an increase in the number of complaints from users who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Meta’s policies.
Complaints over Meta’s policies are not a new topic; nevertheless, they have gained new attention over the past week as a result of complaints about the increase in engagement bait on the platform, as well as complaints about the sometimes unexplained content moderation judgments made by Threads. Adam Mosseri, an executive at Meta who is also in charge of the Threads app, has stated that the business is investigating both of these issues. In the meanwhile, however, there has been a rise in the number of conversations that have taken place on Bluesky, the decentralized service that adheres to a fundamentally different philosophy with regard to the algorithms and moderation that it employs.
Beginning on Wednesday, Bluesky established a presence on Threads, and almost immediately afterward, it started marketing itself as an alternative platform for users who were dissatisfied with Meta. Indeed, it appears that the technique is having an effect. “Bluesky” has been a trending subject on Threads for the past two days in a row, and at the time that this article was written, “Bluesky vs. Meta moderation” was trending on the platform.
Bluesky was quoted as saying in a post that was published on Thursday, “We’re not like the other girls… we’re not owned by a billionaire.” “The social experience you have should be yours to customize, and it should not be subject to the whims of whoever the owner of the platform is.”
Although this is not the first time that Bluesky has made a light-hearted joke about a competitor (see its post on X from earlier this week), the firm is capitalizing on the actual frustration that Threads users are experiencing. On top of the complaints that users have been making about the presence of obvious interaction bait in their feeds, users have also been criticizing the seemingly aggressive moderation strategies that Meta employs on Threads. As a result of the firm’s heavy-handed approach to moderation of the service, several users have reported that the company already restricts the amount of political content that can be found on the app. According to The Verge, a number of individuals have reported that several of their posts have been removed by Meta because they used the phrase “cracker” or “saltines.” Matt Navarra, a social media expert, revealed that he was fined for sharing a BBC item on his Threads account that was about the hoax that went viral about “goodbye Meta AI.”
In contrast, Bluesky has adopted a content filtering strategy that is significantly more adaptable to changing circumstances. It gives people the ability to determine what kind of content they want to see or not, and it also gives them the ability to run their own moderating services. This places the majority of decisions in the hands of the users. “We are always doing baseline moderation, which means that we are providing you with a default moderated experience when you come in [to Bluesky],” Bluesky CEO jay Graber said in an interview with Engadget earlier this year. Furthermore, in addition to that, you have the ability to personalize them.
At this point, it is not obvious whether the recent attention that has been paid to Bluesky will result in a considerable number of new customers leaving the service. Approximately 10.8 million users are currently using Bluesky, as indicated by a dashboard that monitors the company’s expansion. And although it is not entirely apparent how many new users have joined Bluesky in the past few days, it is clear that there has been a bit of an increase over the course of the past month. This is because Bluesky had previously grown to approximately 8.8 million members immediately after the shutdown of X in Brazil the previous month.