CS Insights: Is Bluesky Becoming the New Twitter/X for Journalists?

November 27, 2024

Ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter and rebranded it X, commentators have predicted the platform’s impending demise. Up until this point, those predictions have been foolishly wrong, with X continually cementing its status as the “town square” of the internet.

Why have these predictions been wrong? The answer may lie in where journalists post their news scoops, and there are early signs that may be changing.

There’s often a chicken vs. egg dilemma with any new social media platform, which is only as strong as its most prominent and prolific posters. Without people posting, there’s no reason to join. And without people joining, there’s no reason to post.

However, a noticeable trend has begun to take place over the past month, as the decentralized social media platform Bluesky and to a lesser extent, Threads (by Instagram), have onboarded millions of new users, predominantly at X’s expense.

For many users of X, Musk’s decision to remove certain free features, like the ability to block or mute users or keywords, in favor of prioritizing the content of paid subscribers, were the final straws. For others, there have been issues with X making it harder to link to outside content, with creators observing a noticeable decrease in content referred from the site. And finally, there have been numerous reports about the increase in hateful speech and conduct on the platform under Musk’s ownership as it has allowed misinformation to spread and removed far less content than the company previously did.  

Those issues, combined with Musk’s focus on conservative political causes, have been percolating for some time but up until this point, journalists have largely stuck by the site.

Twitter’s success as the place people went to get news was aided by the fact that most journalists across multiple verticals, including news, business, politics, entertainment and sports, leveraged the platform to share ideas and even break news there. As any Sports Twitter user knows, a major free agency scoop or trade broke on Twitter first. It was the place to follow news in real-time as it happened. If you asked any journalist, they couldn’t survive without Twitter. The same with sports fans.

Other platforms have struggled to replicate this experience despite X’s issues.

Originally there was Mastodon, which failed to catch on. Then there was Threads, which was seen as the best contender to replace X given its ownership under the Meta umbrella. However, it began with an algorithmic feed that deprioritized news and political content in favor of content that could be hours or even days old, much like Instagram does. No journalist wants to post news that may take that long to show up on someone’s feed.

Enter Bluesky, a platform that actually began as a research initiative at Twitter under Jack Dorsey in 2019. The original goal was to develop a reference implementation of the AT Protocol, which is an open communication protocol for distributed social networks. The goal is to essentially provide a user with complete control over the content they see, with a focus on privacy.

Bluesky became an independent company in 2021 and launched as an invite-only service in February 2023 before opening publicly earlier this year. Much like Twitter originally did, Bluesky displays content in a chronological timeline so you can follow developments as they happen. The platform took a slow and steady approach, taking about four months to reach one million installs, with about 40 percent of those coming from the U.S.

Then the 2024 Election happened, which may prove to be the pivotal moment in the platform’s history, much like the 2009 Hudson River plane crash-landing was for Twitter.

Bluesky shares its metrics publicly and has added more than five million users alone in the two weeks following the U.S. Presidential Election. As of November 27, the platform now has approximately 22.9 million registered users, compared to 13 million in October.

As a relatively early adopter of Bluesky, the biggest change I’ve observed during the past month is the quality of journalists posting on the platform. When I first joined, it was hard to find many mainstream reporters leveraging the site to share news as it happened. There’s been a substantial shift in the past month, with many prominent journalists, including sports writers, leveraging the site now, either to exclusively or cross post.

It remains to be seen whether this trend will continue, but early signs are encouraging given the traffic trends cited by some publishers, including the Boston Globe, which noted a significant increase in traffic referrals from Bluesky over other platforms like Threads. Bluesky has also helped the transition with a number of features that make it easy for new users to curate their feed, including:

• Starter Packs are ways for you to share with friends and other users a list of accounts to follow. The number of Starter Packs has skyrocketed over the past month and sites have launched so people can search for different ones. If you’re interested in following sports writers, there’s a Starter Pack for that. If you care about only following journalists from the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, you can find them in a Starter Pack. Or if your goal is to follow a certain interest, like gardening or a type of music, there’s a Starter Pack for that, too.
• Lists can be used to group accounts and then leveraged in different ways. You can create a list of accounts to follow around a specific topic, say the NY Mets. Or you can use lists as a moderation tool, allowing you to share a list of accounts to block. Bluesky lets you publicize the lists you create in your profile, which makes sharing incredibly easy. Users have been sharing lists of accounts to block, which is useful if you want a more pleasant experience on the platform.
• Customizable Handles for Verification offer a different approach to verification than other platforms. By default, every new user on Bluesky is assigned to the bsky.social handle. However, anyone can register their own website domain as a handle, providing an easy way for businesses, news organizations or even individuals (if they so desire) to verify their account without having to pay for it. These are very easy to set up, and I expect most news organizations will leverage this approach to verify their reporters. Businesses should also take this approach to verifying key accounts, like a prominent executive or an external-facing account for sharing news.
• Bluesky apps help elevate the experience beyond the standard platform or app. If you liked TweetDeck (when it was still free), you can use Deck.blue, a third-party web app that essentially recreates the TweetDeck experience with a multi-column layout.

It’ll be interesting to see how Bluesky’s growth trends in the coming weeks and months. The rapid increase in users is already testing its server constraints but if it’s able to adequately meet this demand, there will come a tipping point where the amount of content shared there becomes too hard for an average X user to resist. If that does happen, the predictions of X’s demise may finally prove accurate.