Is Bluesky still good? Yes

In the last few days, I’ve seen a lot of coverage of Bluesky’s declining user numbers. According to data from Similarweb, monthly average users of Bluesky’s mobile app in June declined 27.2% year-on-year. At the same time, Threads’ monthly average users shows a ~20% year-on-year increase.

A few people have argued that this is a bad omen for Bluesky. A signal that Threads is set to win microblogging, a battle that has raged ever since X headily launched its self-owning doom spiral in 2023.

The issue of predictions is that they can make a big impact on something actually becoming true. Especially in the case of networks built on confidence, which results from one of the organising principles that dictate whether platforms sink or swim – known as ‘the network effect’.

What the helly is a network effect?

A network effect is a phenomenon where the value of a system derives from the number of people who use it.

For example: let’s take the humble telephone (one of the early examples of a network effect in action in modern communications).

When Alexander Graham Bell made the world’s first telephone call in 1876, it was hardly the case that every home now suddenly needed a telephone. Unless, you know, you really needed to speak to Alexander Graham Bell.

Mr Bell

Yet if everyone you know has a phone, and they’re all using phones to coordinate all aspects of their lives, then suddenly the situation looks very different. Now you definitely need a phone. What do you mean you don’t have one?

Once a network picks up pace, it can grow very, very fast.

Social media networks at work

Social media networks operate by the same logic as the phone. They live and die by their ability to create and sustain users. The more users that any specific platform has, the harder it becomes to justify your absence. The inverse is also true: the more users depart from a platform, the more inclined you’ll be to leave.

The network effect is advanced by other factors. One is the cost of investing in multiple platforms that do the same jobs. For example: presumably you wouldn’t have two accounts with Internet suppliers to provide Internet to your home (unless you’re running a data centre – in which case, you have bigger problems). Another is the cost of leaving, losing the audience you might have built up over many years. It’s much easier to depart from a platform you never used.

These factors explain why there’s a long history of social media apps emerging, only to crash and burn. Because they failed to win over enough users to create or sustain a network. It takes a lot for a challenger to succeed, and for a heavyweight to fail.

Case study: Twitter (RIP)

The network effect helps explain why Bluesky and Threads grew when they did – because Twitter X had fallen to pieces so dramatically.

Where X offered instability and toxicity, Bluesky provided a classic Twitter experience with a fresh slate and stronger commitments to moderation. Meta identified the same opportunity for change in the market and rushed its competitor, Threads, to production.

Suddenly, there were meaningful challengers to X that offered a similar product – in some ways, a better one – without the downsides.

Monopoly, man

The network effect can lead to monopolisation. If we all go where the most users are in any one category, eventually one platform can win out.

No social media platform has been more aggressive or successful at this than Meta, whose biggest win may have been dethroning MySpace in the late 2000s (which also felt too big to fail).

if you know, you know…

Interestingly, how Facebook achieved this was by putting on a radically different presentation to how we think of Meta today. Here’s an amazing revelation of past perceptions from a 2009 Guardian article (‘# How Facebook beats MySpace’):

In contrast to MySpace, Facebook offers little by way of variation: blue border, white background, a list of friends’ status messages down the middle. With a few minor exceptions, a Facebook page is a Facebook page is a Facebook page.

And users like it that way. For proof, think back to the outrage users expressed when Facebook touched itself up to look a tiny bit more like Twitter. Indeed, Facebook offers this bargain: Users get a space to manage a wide network of friends, family and acquaintances. They get to keep up with the details of the personal and professional lives of their Facebook friends. They can join groups, play games, take public or semi-public stands on issues that matter to them, and access photos, links and other online information that is of deep personal interest to them. In return, Facebook gets to ply users with ads and, to a largely unknown extent (at least by most users), gain access to private and often quite personal information.

This does feel like a bargain, especially for younger users whose entire lives have been lived deep in the morass of corporate-sponsored environments. What’s the difference, after all, between attending a sporting event at Coors Field or Banknorth Gardens and playing Mafia Wars surrounded by ads for whiter teeth and online graduate programmes?

As a side-note: it’s striking to read about that ‘largely unknown extent’ of surveillance. What ramifications this would have in the years to come!

Facebook won people’s hearts by presenting itself as a non-corporate challenger. It was a more innocent and wholesome space for networking with friends and families. I don’t think anyone who works in social media today would use these terms to describe any of Meta’s portfolio of products now. Or how their approach has continued to evolve.

Interestingly, Facebook also aggressively reduced the cost of switching. To conquer MySpace, Facebook made a bot that transferred people’s MySpace profile and network over to Facebook. This meant that there weren’t the downsides of switching up. In effect: they moved house for you.

I think we can see similar behaviour with how Meta eases Threads account creation via Instagram. Threads is very easy to set up for anyone with an Instagram account already. For what it’s worth, I suspect Threads’ MAU is inflated by its Instagram association, as Instagram pushes Threads content to users.

The anxiety of prediction

By interpreting data to suggest that one platform is in the ascendancy while another in decline, we can inadvertently contribute to making that change happen. Backing Meta’s Threads over Bluesky reduces trust in Bluesky, which influences more people to doubt it, and so on, and so forth.

This can create a chain reaction – where one platform emerges as a winner, when really it’s just based purely on speculation.

For marketers and social media workers, these datapoints are alluring. We want do work that is the most effective using the most efficient platforms. It makes sense to be in the place with the larger potential audience and the better features. To not duplicate efforts across several platforms that do the same job.

But personally, I think the jury is still well and truly out. I don’t think Threads is the outright leader yet – and I’m dubious about MAU numbers – and I see many accounts and users having a lot of success on Bluesky.

I think even though we’re a hundred years into this weird social media landscape where Twitter no longer holds orthodoxy, it’s still too soon to say what will win. And I don’t want to do Meta’s marketing for them.

Further reading

- Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow