Bluesky Proves Stagnant Monopolies Are Strangling the Internet

One tiny company has the bloated Facebook empire scrambling to respond.

by Ryan Cooper January 6, 2025

One bright spot in the bleak year of 2024 was the rise of Bluesky. As someone who relied greatly on Twitter for news and my career—OK, I may have been somewhat addicted—before Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a snake pit of neo-Nazi filth, it was nice to see a Twitter-like replacement rise to relative prominence.

I joined in April 2023 as about the 47,000th user. Today, Bluesky has about 26 million users, and seems to be growing healthily. It actually has some notable improvements on Twitter, like the “starter pack” function where users can put together a group of accounts that one can follow at once (here’s the starter pack for Prospect writers, incidentally), or the “nuclear block” where if one participant in a conversation blocks the other, the entire conversation is zapped. This greatly cuts down on Twitter’s culture of aggressive pile-ons and abuse.

Unlike any other big platform, Bluesky does not censor posts with outgoing links. Indeed, it does not have any proprietary “for you” algorithm, instead defaulting to a traditional reverse-chronological feed, and allowing users to pick from algorithms that can be developed by others. This has major implications for publishers: Despite its modest size, The Guardian reports that Bluesky traffic has already outstripped that from Twitter, and here at the Prospect Bluesky traffic now regularly matches Twitter and is many times that of Facebook.

This ability to share outside the platform is proving so popular that Facebook’s Twitter clone, Threads, has belatedly altered its algorithm to include more posts from accounts you follow in an attempt to compete. And this disruption is being done on a shoestring budget—Bluesky has just 20 employees and about $23 million in funding, as compared to Meta’s 70,000+ workers and $156 billion in annual revenue.
https://prospect.org/power/2025-01-06-bluesky-proves-stagnant-monopolies-strangling-internet/