Vice: Threads Is All the Worst Parts of Twitter and Instagram in One Very Bad App

But Mastodon is built on a technology stack almost as old as Twitter’s, and has largely failed to achieve widespread adoption despite several mass-exoduses from Twitter. BlueSky is more promising, using a brand new protocol called AT which promises to let users not only create their own instances of the service, but filter their feeds with custom algorithms, instead of settling for one centrally-controlled “master algorithm” that prioritizes engagement above all else.

I continue to be flummoxed by the popular take that Bluesky is doing so much better than Mastodon. Mastodon has 2 million active users and is built on ActivityPub, which means it also communicates with other services that use the same protocol. Oh, and Threads will bring its 100+ million users to ActivityPub soon(ish).

Meanwhile, Bluesky has somewhere around 50,000 total users, uses a protocol that no one else has adopted, and while they talk about federation coming, it’s not there yet. Sure, the alternate algorithmic timeline options are cool, but that’s really it in my eyes.

Also, this isn’t really the most important thing, but they call it “BlueSky” throughout the article despite the actual spelling being “Bluesky”. Come on, now.