It wasn’t that long ago that things were really looking up for the sports community on Bluesky. Twitter experienced technical issues on July 1st that made the site literally inaccessible for most people, causing a sudden surge of prominent sports tweeters to hop on Bluesky – a Twitter-like start-up that’s been in beta since February – instead.
Bluesky was so unprepared for the influx of traffic that the app also crashed and had to halt the handing out of any additional invites, but for one shining moment, for the briefest of times, it looked as though the sports community on there, which had been more or less invisible up to that point, was actually about to take off.
And then, less than 72 hours later, Meta announced they were moving up the launch of their Twitter rival “Threads” to that week. And just like that, the possibility of Bluesky becoming any kind of haven for sports vanished into thin air.
The launch of Threads is some level of devastating for Bluesky’s prospects, because whereas Bluesky is not easy to get into (you have to know someone to get an invite), anyone can join Threads. And whereas Bluesky is missing a myriad of features such as video and GIF functionality that are critical for discussing topics like sports, Threads featured them right out of the gate. That made Threads a perfect landing spot for disaffected Twitter users in a way that Bluesky, in its current state, could never be, and it’s why the moment Threads launched, many of the biggest names in sports who had never even sniffed Bluesky immediately created an account on there.
It’s very hard not to conclude that Threads is going to be the next Twitter. Its Instagram-based roots mean that it will cater to a rather different audience than Twitter does, and I expect that much of Twitter’s massive user base will hold out on completely transferring there for a bit while some of its (horrible) kinks get worked out. But there’s just no fighting the gravity on this.
Threads is going to continue to expand and, for all its issues, will likely soon be capable of offering everything you can get on Twitter. And Twitter, for all its perks, will likely continue to get worse and worse and continue to wear people down with the childish antics of its loathsome, egomaniac owner.
Eventually, something will give; enough people will join Threads and Twitter will become so broken or hampered or ruined that – having been labeled a dying, has-been app – it will become a place that people don’t really visit anymore. Threads will become “the next Twitter” not because it’ll be better than Twitter was, but because this incarnation of Twitter is simply unsustainable. Now that there’s, at last, a competitor capable of stealing millions of users away from it, it may be sooner than we think before Twitter’s stranglehold on microblogging crumbles away.
And where does that leave Bluesky? With potential only.
Bluesky still has a role to play in the Twitter wars. There are millions of people who would happily flock to Bluesky instead of Threads on the belief that it more accurately captures the spirit of what Twitter was like in the pre-Elon days. Bluesky has a chance to become a kind of Poster’s Valhalla, a refuge for people who want to interact with others while still remaining anonymous and without being bothered by influencers, brands, or real-life acquaintances. Many people liked Twitter because they found separation from those spheres on there, and I’m confident that many would find that again on Bluesky – enough that its user base could eventually dwarf those of every other Twitter challenger that isn’t Threads.
But as a sports community? Bluesky is done as a serious challenger. There is now absolutely no reason for any sports brand, athlete, reporter, or commentator to plant themselves on that app other than for their own personal amusement. Maybe that could change in the future, but for now, Bluesky’s sports community will be akin to the sports community that you’d have found in the sports section on the message board of a video games site twenty years ago. It will technically exist, and that will be about the extent of it. For an actual sports community, you will almost certainly have to go to Threads eventually.
What’s tragic about this is that I believe Bluesky could’ve become a thriving sports community. There absolutely was a path in which Woj and Shams and major athletes and major sports accounts would’ve made Bluesky their de facto next home instead. Back in May, I wrote for Awful Announcing that I expected Bluesky to one day do what Threads is eventually going to do and supplant Twitter, and I don’t doubt that I would’ve been right had Bluesky gone public before Threads did. But that didn’t happen. In fact, not only did that not happen, it didn’t even come close to happening because Bluesky put seemingly no effort whatsoever into actually launching ahead of them – something I didn’t see coming at all.
In that article, I mentioned a paragraph-long list of features that Bluesky still needed to adopt. Two months later, exactly one of them has been addressed (you can hide replies now).
Bluesky had a precious few months in which they were THE major Twitter challenger in the game. Those were months that they could’ve spent scaling up, hiring moderators, adding videos, adding GIFs, and doing everything possible to get out into the public as quickly as possible to make sure that they didn’t squander this once-in-a-lifetime chance. Instead, it appears that wasn’t their objective at all. Bluesky is going to lose the battle to be the next Twitter and it’s not because people from Twitter rejected their platform, like they did with Mastodon. Far from it, Bluesky is consistently the platform that the few people who are able to get on it say they like the most. No, Bluesky lost the battle because they didn’t even try.
Bluesky, I believe, is run by considerate, conscientious people who unfortunately are way, waaaaaaay too deep in the woods of their own self-involvement to understand what their priorities should actually be. Bluesky was founded with the purpose of becoming a decentralized, fully federated social media platform, and just about every other update from the app’s creators lavishes its improvements with federation.
But here’s the thing: about 95% of the people who’ve joined their app in the last few months don’t care even remotely about federation. Users flocked to them because they wanted a Twitter-like app that wasn’t run by a maniac, and Bluesky just so happened to be the one most similar to it. That’s it. In other words, people joined Bluesky in spite of its allegiance to federation, not because of it, and if Bluesky was run smartly, its leaders would’ve recognized that dynamic and promptly pivoted to capitalizing on the amazing opportunity that had fallen into their lap. If Bluesky’s brain trust were savvy, they would’ve paused all work on federation or anything that wasn’t critical to making it just like Twitter, done everything in their power to scale up for substantially more users, added critical features like videos and gifs, and then, only once they had gone public and secured their place in the market, then they would’ve resumed their work with federation.
Instead, the opposite happened. Since the app’s beta launched in February, there have been almost no significant improvements made to Bluesky in areas that would’ve made it more like Twitter, outside of blocking being added and some accessibility improvements. To put it bluntly, I don’t think it ever occurred to the people making Bluesky that all they had to do was get out of beta and put out an app that was like pre-Elon Twitter and they would’ve been staring victory in the face. I think they mistook their influx of new users as confirmation that they needed to stay full-steam ahead on their inessential, long-term quest of creating something decentralized.
And while they never understood the assignment and never grasped that they needed to be in the Twitter replica business and not the Twitter-but-decentralized business, Meta did. Whereas Bluesky did as little as possible to pounce on Twitter’s misfortunes, Meta did the opposite, moving up the launch date of Threads – an app that not coincidentally is not currently federated – specifically to capitalize on the fact that Twitter had been barely functional since July 1. Meta understood that there was a huge audience of users that wanted a Twitter clone they could get onto as soon as possible, and they met them halfway by starting Threads even earlier than they planned to. It was a brilliant decision. It was also one that Bluesky wouldn’t have made.
That’s why Threads is an app you’re probably going to have to be on if you want to follow sports from now on. And that’s why Bluesky… isn’t.
Editor’s Note: You can still reach the author of this piece on Bluesky @velodus.bsky.social.
