Day-after-day on the positioning previously often known as Twitter, folks put up lengthy goodbyes to their followers and directions on methods to discover them in “the opposite place”.

They’re referring, in fact, to Bluesky.

However though their fortunes are intertwined, Bluesky’s chief working officer, Rose Wang, bristles on the fixed comparisons.

“Individuals simply assume that we’re some kind of Twitter various, however we’re very a lot not,” she tells The Unbiased. “It’d be like calling Nineteen Fifties TV the identical factor as YouTube.”

The similarities are exhausting to keep away from, nevertheless. Bluesky began as a undertaking inside Twitter in 2019 and was spun out right into a separate firm by founder Jack Dorsey two years later. The feel and appear of the positioning is sort of the identical as X. Squint and also you’d be forgiven for mistaking them.

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For an growing variety of customers, although, there’s one essential distinction: Bluesky just isn’t run by a megalomaniac billionaire intent on bending the world to his will.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, thousands and thousands of longtime customers have deserted the positioning in anger over its rightward lurch and an more and more poor consumer expertise. Musk fired some 80 p.c of employees, amplified right-wing viewpoints, eliminated safeguards that protected in opposition to hate speech and misinformation, reinstated the accounts of extremists and neo-Nazis (and Trump), and banned important journalists.

After luring liberals from X at a gentle tempo since launching in February final yr, Bluesky had a breakout second within the days after the re-election of Donald Trump. The corporate noticed about 1,000,000 customers a day becoming a member of, for a number of days, amid fury over Musk’s help for Trump’s marketing campaign. Some 115,000 customers deactivated their accounts on X throughout the identical interval, the largest-ever mass exit from the platform.

By subsequent yr, in accordance with analysts at digital analysis firm eMarketer, Musk’s takeover may have price X some 7 million customers.

Instagram’s Threads was seen because the favored various for some time, and nonetheless has extra customers — however Bluesky now has the momentum.

Wang believes the rationale that Bluesky is rising whereas others are stalling comes down to manage. Bluesky doesn’t have an overriding algorithm that controls what folks see. If X is the city sq., the place the loudest voices drown out everybody else, then Bluesky is a celebration that you’ve chosen to attend with visitors just like you.

Customers can create lists of individuals to comply with primarily based on topic or curiosity, block accounts and sure kinds of posts, and undertake customized timeline filters. All of those controls are geared toward making a extra social, much less poisonous, surroundings.

“It’s really lending itself to far more pro-social habits,” Wang says. “We’re used to being trapped in a single algorithm managed by a small group of individuals. That’s not the case, and our customers have constructed over 50,000 completely different feeds, like completely different cat feeds or Taylor Swift feeds, or F1 feeds. And these feeds principally present cozier corners for folks with different related pursuits to satisfy one another.”

Nonetheless, Bluesky faces some huge challenges in overtaking X. Twitter’s rise was fuelled by news-addicted journalists and readers, shortly changing into the go-to place for large information occasions — a cultural and political assembly level.

Whether or not Bluesky even desires to be that sort of place just isn’t solely clear. In the meanwhile, it appears torn between a rush to change into the world’s new chat room, and a spot for folks to assemble in smaller numbers particular to their pursuits.

“I believe that’s a false dichotomy,” Wang says in response to that time. “It’s like asking folks offline, do you solely stay with a household, or do you additionally produce other mates and participate in a worldwide world?”

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“A world stage is a neighborhood, however you and your buddy are additionally a neighborhood, and so we’re supplying you with the flexibleness to increase that neighborhood in concentric circles nevertheless you want,” she provides.

Bluesky hopes it could supply particular advantages to the identical journalists and media corporations that fuelled Twitter’s progress. Particularly, which means extra engagement and extra site visitors.

“You’re making an attempt to drive folks to what’s taking place elsewhere, and that is the foyer in which you’ll be able to uncover that. That’s not how different platforms work, the place they’re walled gardens and their incentives to maintain you locked in,” Wang says.

Wang notes that Bluesky’s enterprise mannequin permits it to be extra liberal in letting folks depart the positioning. The corporate’s chief government Jay Graber pledged to not “enshittify the community with adverts” and Wang sings the same tune, noting that they need folks to go and discover hyperlinks and browse tales elsewhere, utilizing Bluesky as their distribution channel.

But when the enterprise mannequin isn’t centered round adverts, how does it plan to become profitable?

Wang factors to a press launch that mentions a subscription mannequin “for options like larger high quality video uploads or profile customizations like colours and avatar frames.”

Within the meantime, Wang says Bluesky isn’t simply ready for Musk to say one thing poisonous to develop its consumer base. Persons are becoming a member of for a wide range of causes, a whole bunch of hundreds signed up when Threads was having moderation points, for instance.

Wang credit “underlying discontent” with the options.

“It’s often that you simply’ve had a extremely dangerous time, you’ve been sad, and it’s one thing that suggestions you off,” she mentioned. “That’s what we’re seeing now. Individuals have felt that they’ve been in poisonous areas for a very long time. They’re consuming greater than they’re really producing content material and they’re simply not making mates anymore.”