The surest sign a social media platform is winning: when Meta starts cribbing notes from it.
Stories only arrived on Instagram in 2016 after Snapchat proved the ephemeral concept had some heat. Reels launched on Instagram in 2020 and Facebook and 2021, piggybacking off the TikTok phenomenon of the previous couple years. Just as BeReal’s brand of dual-camera spontaneity started taking off, Meta gave Instagram users that option, too. And sure enough, when it comes to Meta’s Threads, the company appears set on being more like Bluesky.
The postelection exodus from Elon Musk’s X led to a dramatic uptick in users on both Threads and Bluesky. The former added 35 million new residents in three weeks, for a total of about 275 million, while Bluesky’s base has increased by 10 million, just passing the 25 million mark overall. But even though Threads is technically winning the America’s Next Twitter competition, at least in terms of raw numbers, Bluesky has more of what its users half-ironically call the juice. It’s simply hotter, attracting more headlines and generating more conversation—especially about politics, a topic Threads opted to deprioritize.
Anyone needing further proof of Bluesky’s recent dominance, though, need merely look at how Threads is trying to steal—or, to be more precise, clone—its thunder.
Less than two weeks after the election, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Threads would be testing a new feature: dedicated feeds, allowing users to customize feeds around topics of their choosing. Of course, Bluesky had already adopted the Choose Your Own Adventure–style feed experience in July 2023.
The feature-poaching did not stop there. One of the ongoing user complaints about Threads has been its default nonchronological feed serving up posts well past their sell-by date. As the proudly default-chronological Bluesky continued to close the gap with Threads in daily users throughout November, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the platform would become more follower-friendly, showing users “less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do.”
The de-For You Page-ification of Threads could either be seen as a response to Bluesky’s success, or possibly just a huge coincidence. But there’s no mistaking what came next. On Thursday, Mosseri announced Threads is now testing its own version of what has become, in some ways, Bluesky’s defining feature: Starter Packs.
Introduced on the platform back in June, Starter Packs allow Blueskyers to recommend groups of other users in a category of their choosing—from Geology Experts to People Who Make Me Laugh to, ahem, Fast Company writers—allowing others to follow them all at once (or à la carte.) Here’s how Mosseri describes Meta’s latest familiar development: “a way for you to find and easily follow collections of profiles that post about popular topics on Threads.”
It’s obvious why Threads is operating in copycat mode: It’s what Meta has always done. Even the origin of Facebook traces back to Zuckerberg allegedly copying the Winklevoss’s Harvard Connection concept. More importantly, though, Bluesky seems to have crystallized in the popular imagination as the premier alternative to X, while Threads remains a vastly more populous Other Option—Mastodon with a heavy brand presence. Making Threads more like Bluesky will not be enough to change that dynamic.
A lot of Bluesky users who migrated from X—a group that includes celebrities, journalists, politicians, and those lovingly referred to as shitposters—have already made their choice. They aren’t starting over again any time soon. Threads may be able to stanch the flow of fresh X-pats looking for a new home, the ones who haven’t made their mind up yet, but it seems far less likely to make a critical mass change their minds. In fact, the more Threads comes to resemble Bluesky, the more the latter’s users might want to stick with the real thing.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, after all, but it’s also a sign of desperation.
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