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It’s been more than two years since Elon Musk officially took over as the owner of Twitter — now X — and while a lot of platforms rushed in to try and be the next big microblogging service, many haven’t survived. Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky have all proven to be viable alternatives, but places like Pebble (formerly T2) and Post News didn’t make it.
Threads is perhaps the likely successor, having reached 275 million monthly users as of October 2024, and it seems committed to fediverse integration by building features around the ActivityPub protocol. Bluesky, which relies on its own decentralized AT Protocol for social networking, continues to grow and saw a surge of users after the 2024 election, though with somewhere north of 14.5 million users, it’s still well behind Threads. Mastodon, which also uses the ActivityPub protocol, was already well-established by the time Musk bought Twitter but has struggled to grow its active user base.
There still isn’t a clear successor to Twitter. X hasn’t become the massive “everything app” that Musk says he wants it to be. But despite the success of Threads, continued existence of Mastodon, and the growth of Bluesky, X is still the place where many people and companies post things before they go anywhere else — at least, for now.
Here’s our coverage of the alternatives to X.
Tweetbot’s developers are making a Bluesky app
Image: Tapbots
Tapbots, the developer behind the well-loved Tweetbot and Ivory apps for Twitter and Mastodon, is working on an iOS and Mac app for Bluesky called Phoenix, as spotted by MacStories. The company plans to release the app this summer and says it will open a “limited public alpha as soon as we can.”
This isn’t a move away from Mastodon; after Phoenix is out, Tapbots plans to develop both Ivory and Phoenix concurrently. “Mastodon is our home on the social web and we will continue to invest our time there,” Tapbots says in a Q&A on the Phoenix landing page. “Since the incredible growth of Bluesky in the past year, our customer base has become split between the two services and for us to continue to thrive as a company, we must support both. Unfortunately, we can’t survive on Mastodon alone.”
Instagram for Bluesky is here.
The mostly free Flashes app launched today, integrating into the X expats’ favorite Bluesky and letting users publish up to four photos or a 1-minute-long video per post. Though off to a slightly bumpy start, it’s currently #9 in the Social Networking category on the Apple App Store. It even has vibrant filters, if you have no respect for your work.
Bluesky now lets users restrict replies to followers
Bluesky announced it’s rolling out an X-like “followers only” option for replies to posts, in addition to options for limiting replies to people mentioned or people you follow. To enable the feature for all of your posts by default, update your app to version 1.98 and then head over to Interaction Settings under Moderation in the app’s Settings section.
The social networking platform has also added a new “search posts” feature for user profiles.
Image: Bluesky
Bluesky now has 30 million users.
Bluesky adds a video tab to user profiles.
Bluesky’s video posts are still limited to just one minute, but they should be easier to find outside of feeds now that you can simply swap to that tab to see any videos that someone has posted.
Screenshot: Bluesky
NFL teams can’t use Bluesky
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
The NFL told the New England Patriots to shut down the team’s Bluesky account. Patriots VP of content Fred Kirsch said the team was told that Bluesky is “not an approved social media platform for the NFL yet,” addressing a fan question on a January 16th episode of the Patriots Unfiltered podcast, as spotted by Awful Announcing.
Kirsch said the team “briefly” had a Bluesky account before the league asked it to take the account down. The NFL told Front Office Sports in November it was aware of Bluesky but had no presence there, Awful Announcing notes. The league declined to comment when we reached out.
Bluesky’s 2024 moderation report is out.
The platform grew from “2.89M users to 25.94M users” last year and the moderation team has “roughly 100 moderators,” according to the report.
Bluesky is getting a video-first app called Flashes.
Users will be able to post up-to-four-image photo posts and 1-minute-long videos, according to TechCrunch. Comments will be supported, as will DMs. Developer Sebastian Vogelsang plans to launch Flashes “in a matter of weeks” after an iOS TestFlight beta period, the outlet writes.
The app will reportedly be free to use with some subscription-based features, just like Vogelsang’s other Bluesky client called Skeets.
Free Our Feeds wants to build a social media ecosystem ‘resistant to billionaire influence’
Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The project aims to raise $30 million over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized network powering Bluesky.
The raised funds will go toward launching a public interest foundation to support the project, while creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky users, developers, and researchers access to the content and data posted “no matter what the company decides to do in the future.”
Bluesky adds Trending topics to its arsenal
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
As a special holiday treat, on December 25th, the social media app Bluesky announced that it has added a new feature to its mobile app: a list of Trending topics that lets you know what subjects are popular among its users.
The new feature can be found by selecting the search icon (the magnifying glass), which appears at the bottom of the screen on the mobile app and on the left sidebar on the web. Lists of Trending and Recommended subjects now appear below the search bar. Tap on any topic, and you will be able to access the associated posts. When I tried it, choices among the top five included Christmas and Nosferatu (not an unexpected selection of topics but an interesting juxtaposition).
Bluesky now has a mentions tab in your notifications area
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Bluesky now has a specific tab for mentions in your notifications as part of the app’s just-released 1.96 update. With the mentions tab, it’s much easier to see your replies or conversations you’ve been tagged in on the platform.
Speaking of replies, update 1.96 lets you easily access settings that let you control how replies on posts appear to you. Replies can be linear, meaning they show up one post after another, or threaded, which means they will appear in indented threads (kind of like how they appear on Reddit). You can also sort replies by newest, oldest, most-liked, “hot,” and “random” (which Bluesky also calls “Poster’s Roulette”).
Threads starts testing scheduled posts
Image: The Verge
Threads is about to begin testing the ability to schedule posts, according to Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. “Replies cannot be scheduled,” he added, explaining that “we want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversation.”
Mosseri also makes sure to note that Instagram has been working on this feature “for months.” I’m choosing to take as a sign that the Instagram chief is fed up with the notion that Bluesky is the motivating factor behind every new improvement that comes to Threads. Last week, Threads introduced curated collections of people to follow, which drew comparisons to Bluesky’s starter packs.
Fediverse creator payment platform sub.club is shutting down
Sub.club, which lets fediverse creators offer paid subscriptions and premium content and launched at the end of August, is already shutting down. “With regret, we will be winding down this project over the next few weeks,” the sub.club team announced last week. Creators using the service will be “fully paid,” but sub.club feeds will stop working “by the end of January.”
As I wrote when I first covered sub.club, the service seemed like an interesting way to let people on the fediverse more easily monetize their audience without having to point them toward other platforms like Patreon. But the group that built it, The BLVD, has run out of funding.
Instagram’s head says social media needs more context because of AI
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
In a series of Threads posts this afternoon, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says users shouldn’t trust images they see online because AI is “clearly producing” content that’s easily mistaken for reality. Because of that, he says users should consider the source, and social platforms should help with that.
“Our role as internet platforms is to label content generated as AI as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but he admits “some content” will be missed by those labels. Because of that, platforms “must also provide context about who is sharing” so users can decide how much to trust their content.
Threads takes an important baby step toward true fediverse integration
Screenshot: Threads
You can now follow fediverse accounts on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced. Threads rolled out fediverse users’ likes and replies in a very limited way at first, and it’s the same here — fediverse posts won’t appear in your feeds, and you can only follow those accounts if they’ve interacted with a post on Threads.
While fediverse posts won’t show in feeds, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says their profile and posts do appear on Threads, and you have the option to get notifications when they publish. That’s something, at least. Mosseri posted a video of what the process looks like:
Threads’ next update is a search feature that finds the post you’re looking for
Threads is rolling out a search update globally over the next few weeks that will let users filter searches to a specific profile and within date ranges. The existing search built into Threads has been a basic keyword search to find trending topics, posts, or accounts, with “Top” and “Recent” sorting options.
The updated version adds a settings icon to the search bar that, when tapped, brings up “After date,” “Before date,” and “From profile” options.
Bluesky won’t use your posts for AI training, but can it stop anyone else?
Today, a Hugging Face employee published data from 1 million Bluesky posts scraped from its API to the AI repository. He’s removed it and apologized, but 404 Media notes the set was “trending” all day.
Bluesky says it’s looking into ways to “specify consent (or not) for AI training.” but acknowledges that “It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings.”
Bluesky is working on addressing the EU’s DSA complaints.
Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu confirmed in an email to The Verge that the platform is “actively working” with its lawyers to ensure Bluesky’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act’s information disclosure rules, as Bloomberg reports.
Yesterday, the European Commission called out that Bluesky has no page listing “how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” as required by the DSA.
Update November 26th: Updated with confirmation from Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu.
Threads says 35 million users signed up in November
Image: The Verge
Meta’s Threads has accrued over 35 million signups so far in November and is “going on three months with more than a million signups a day,” Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge in an email today.
20 million of those signups have come since November 14th, as Axios notes. That’s on top of the 15 million that Instagram head Adam Mosseri said it had gathered in the two weeks prior.
Threads is testing the option to choose your own default feed
Illustration: The Verge
Threads will now let users decide what feed they want as their default when opening the app. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in a post, saying that you’ll be able to choose between For You, Following, or any custom feed that you’ve set up. Zuckerberg’s post notes that Threads is “testing” this option and will also different feeds “more visible” in the app.
It took over a year to get here, but Threads is finally doing the obvious thing and allowing people to use the app however they prefer. Hopefully this test expands to all users before long.
Bluesky is breaking the rules in the EU
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
The European Union says Twitter alternative Bluesky violates the EU Digital Services Act rules around information disclosure, reports Reuters. But since Bluesky isn’t yet big enough to be considered a “very large online platform” under the DSA, the regulator says it can’t regulate Bluesky the way it does X or Threads.
The Financial Times quotes European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier, who told reporters about the violation during a Monday press briefing:
Threads.com shows something now.
Meta seemed to have bought the domain earlier this year, sometime after it bought the company that owned it prior to the debut of threads.net, where Meta’s Twitter competitor lives.
Previously, visiting the threads.com URL didn’t show anything, but today, it shows... well, an error message. With a “Meta © 2024” and a Facebook logo.
Twitter’s heir apparent isn’t X or Threads — it’s Bluesky
Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Bluesky feels like the big winner right now.
I’ve been covering Bluesky ever since I got my invite in April 2023. I’ve felt the platform has always had promise, especially with features like feeds with custom algorithms and the ability to let users pick their own moderation filters. But for a long while, it didn’t have the critical mass of users that I could follow to make it the first social network I load up every day.
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