Meta is in hot water after announcing plans to remove politics from its recommendations across Instagram and Threads, its new Twitter-like app for text-based posts. That leaves a window of opportunity for startup Bluesky, whose CEO Jay Graber recently explained that Meta’s decision is emblematic of the types of problems that could arise when you have “an algorithm run by one company,” and how different Bluesky application.
“It’s kind of a black box, the company can do whatever they want and users don’t really have a choice,” Graber said in response to a question about Meta’s censorship policy during an interview with The Techmeme Ride Home podcast. “The goal of creating algorithmic options in the beginning with Bluesky was to always be able to choose what kind of feed you get. You can control your scrolling,” he added.
On Bluesky, Graber said, users could choose to have a highly political social experience, following custom feeds with political and trending topics, or they could choose to filter out politics altogether.
“Two people using the same Bluesky app could – one could have a very comfortable, quiet experience, no politics, just seeing their friends’ posts and maybe liking, photos of moss and cats,” Graber suggested . “And then someone else could follow trending topics, Super Bowl talk, politics, whatever’s going on.”
Or, as Graber herself does, they could switch between different modes based on what they wanted to see at the time.
Unlike mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Meta-powered Threads, or even the Elon Musk-run X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky takes a different approach to social media. It looks more like its open-source Twitter competitor Mastodon in that it will also offer a decentralized social networking service, albeit powered by a different networking protocol – the AT Protocol, rather than ActivityPub, which Mastodon integrates with.
Although Threads also plans to integrate with ActivityPub, Meta’s moderation decisions will ultimately apply to everyone using Threads, even if it becomes a node in the larger unified network that includes Mastodon and other ActivityPub-supported apps. And with over 130 million monthly active users as of Q4 Meta, The threads would dwarf the rest of Mastodonwhich currently has approximately 1 million monthly active users, says its website.
Bluesky, meanwhile, is already bigger than Mastodon, having nearly doubled its user base since opening its doors to the public last week. The app today approaching 5 million users (it’s at 4.86 million, right now) and is working to enable federation later this month, the company said earlier.
However, the biggest draw for users may not be the protocols it uses for social networking, but the ease with which users can customize their experience – something that’s most lacking from Mastodon, which has struggled with usability. Until its release in September, for example, Mastodon users couldn’t even search for posts. they had to rely on hashtags.
Bluesky also aims to offer hashtags, Graber said. “It’s actually on the way,” she said in the interview, referring to the introduction of hashtags.
But at Bluesky, hashtags won’t just be a way to display terms and trends. They can also power custom feeds, the CEO noted. Thanks to Bluesky’s API, developers have created custom tools such as SkyFeedwhich allows anyone — even non-developers — to create their own streams using a graphical user interface.
“You can start building custom feeds that do things — based on lists, hashtags, words, regular expressions, machine learning,” Graber said. “And these tools are getting better and better and creating more options for people who want to be creative, have an idea for streaming, but don’t know how to code.”
As the election season approaches, the promise of personalized, personalized social media could attract a group of users who want an alternative to Twitter — X is going in a different direction that includes payments, shopping, and the creator’s content — but where the rules are not dictated by one person, or in Meta’s casecreated out of fear of punishment by legislators and regulators.
