Among apps vying to replace Twitter, Bluesky may have the news and innovation edge

Even before the U.S. election sped up an exodus from the Elon Musk-owned site, X had reportedly lost one-fifth of its active users in the U.S. and one-third in the U.K.. Bluesky seems to have the juice to win over some of those fleeing users — especially journalists and others interested in news and current events.

Over the past week, Bluesky has gained nearly 2 million new users. On Wednesday, Bluesky surpassed 15 million users and appeared as the No. 1 app in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. By Thursday afternoon, the site was close to 16 million users. (Nieman Lab is one of them. You can find us on Bluesky here.)

Over on the Meta-owned Threads, the user base is bigger and growing faster. (Threads claims more than 275 million monthly users.) But it remains frustratingly difficult to follow live events on Threads and, thanks to its unfriendly approach to political journalism, many news hounds find it lacking.

I wrote about Bluesky’s big week and the post-election realignment in social networks www.platformer.news/bluesky-thre…

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— Casey Newton (@caseynewton.bsky.social) November 11, 2024 at 8:05 PM

Bluesky, on the other hand, “seems to remember something important about what once made Twitter successful: news and sports,” as Alex Kirshner noted in Slate. “Twitter’s growth was supercharged when enough people realized that it was the place to be for everything from updates on a hurricane making landfall to chatter about a late-night Portland Trail Blazers game.”

Another factor? Bluesky is brimming with what Kirshner calls the “wholesome chaos” of early Twitter. People are building things — cool features and custom custom algorithms and “starter packs” of accounts to follow.

Starter packs are genius, but I was surprised there wasn’t a list of them for people to find.

So I built it:
blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack…

The website monitors the packs being shared and adds the ones it finds to the database.

Missed your stater pack? Message me and I’ll get it added.

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— Mubashar “Mubs” Iqbal (@mubashariqbal.com) November 11, 2024 at 11:13 AM

Bluesky has said it plans to develop a subscription model for “features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames” but remain free to use. The app has introduced direct messaging, videos, and standard feeds like “following,” “discover,” and “popular with friends” but a lot of the neatest stuff is being built by the broader Bluesky community.

Some of the custom feeds and features we noticed:

• A custom feed with the most popular posts on Bluesky in the past three hours.
• Or one with the most popular links on the platform in the last 24 hours.
• You can set your domain as your handle for verification. (Or, if applicable, self-verify on your MSNBC show.)

“I have to say, I’ve really been enjoying the platform Bluesky. It functions almost identically to Twitter—but without all the baggage,” says @chrislhayes.bsky.social.

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— Caroline Ambrose (@carebrose.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 9:25 PM

• There’s a TweetDeck-like client called Deck.Blue.

since I’ve gained over 1000 followers in the past hour, quick refresher on deck.blue:

it’s a tweetdeck-like client that I started developing back in august 2023 on the same day the old tweetdeck got paywalled

i have nothing to do with twitter, the original tweetdeck team or even the bluesky team

— deck.blue (@deck.blue) November 12, 2024 at 12:16 PM

• Don’t want to miss “quieter posters”? This feed shows posts from your friends who don’t post often and this one has posts from non-mutuals who follow you.
• Find your favorite Twitter follows with Sky Follower Bridge.
• Miss the handy news aggregator Nuzzel? A similar app – collecting links from Bluesky and Mastodon — is in beta testing.
• See every post that has prompted someone to reply “hell yeah.”
• And a feed of feeds.

What did we miss? Let me know at sarah_scire@harvard.edu.