(Bloomberg Opinion) -- X, formerly Twitter, has kept finding new ways to get worse ever since it was taken over by the world’s richest man. And that was before it began doubling as a generator of non-consensual AI porn, some featuring children, earlier this year.
Yet even all that has not unseated its role in global discourse. I’ve long since disengaged, but I still find myself scrolling, despite efforts to migrate to one of its most-hyped rivals, Bluesky Social.
The platform’s failure for me is that it still hasn’t matched the international reach X inherited from Twitter. When global news breaks, such as the US and Israel starting a war with Iran, X still hosts the largest community of real-time voices. “No one likes to hear that the Nazi Bar serves better drinks,” a security and diplomacy professor recently put it, “but if you’re professionally interested in coverage of the hard security aspects of the war Bluesky is not enough.” And it’s not only during crisis. Even for casually tracking tech trends from Bengaluru to Tokyo that have nothing to do with US political melodrama, X remains annoyingly useful.
Many argue that Bluesky’s largest constraint is ideological, that it’s become a liberal echo chamber. But the biggest thing holding it back is not that it’s a progressive bubble, it’s that it’s an American one.
Almost half (47%) of Bluesky’s daily active app users are from the US, compared with just 15% of X’s, according to Sensor Tower. That’s on top of a much smaller base: The market intelligence firm estimates X has 31 million US mobile app DAUs versus 2 million for the upstart.
But Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told me that it’s a misunderstanding to think of it as only a mobile app. What makes it different is its protocol tech, which lets people build different networks on top of it, like Blacksky, a social community created by people who were formerly active on Black Twitter. Wang says there are about 6,000 apps built on their ecosystem. Bluesky itself, she said, has 43 million global users, an impressive feat for a platform that just turned two and employs about 40 people. Wang notes that it took then-Twitter “three to four years” to reach that scale.
And it has been expanding abroad, slowly but steadily, often one breaking news moment at a time: when X was banned in Brazil, or when martial law was declared in South Korea. “Growth on social platforms is rarely linear and rarely happens in isolation,” Wang says. The trillion-dollar question is how to turn those refugees into regulars.
For all of Bluesky’s growing pains, there are reasons to root for it. It’s often treated as a one-for-one replacement for X, but that’s a false equivalence. Its ambition is decentralization: letting users build their own networks and exert more control over their feeds. That’s the opposite of the algorithmically amplified speech served up on X, or the ad-driven engagement machine that powers platforms such as Facebook. Instead of trapping users inside a walled garden, it’s built to support links and the open web.
There are obvious ways for Bluesky to widen its geographic reach. On-platform translation is low-hanging fruit. As my colleague Gearoid Reidy has written, this helped spur Americans and Japanese X users to bond over a shared love of barbecue, making a chaotic world feel a lot smaller. Its competitor could do the same by lowering linguistic barriers. AI-powered translation is already far better than it was even a few years ago.
Another priority is winning over the more heavy-posting news influencers. Even in its prime, Twitter never matched other social networks in active users. Its outsize influence came from a concentration of journalists, politicians and other agenda-setters arguing in public. Many of these “news influencers” still post more regularly on X, according to Pew data. Bluesky needs to make a more forceful case that its decentralized architecture is better for driving traffic to Substacks, blogs and publisher sites than X, where the algorithm demotes outside links.
It doesn’t help that several would-be Twitter successors emerged at once. There’s President Donald Trump’s mouthpiece Truth Social (don’t get me started) and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Threads (which one internet culture reporter, who boasts 17 hours of screentime per day, dubbed her least-favorite social network of all). Threads’ international growth in daily active users is outpacing Bluesky. But it’s unclear how many of these opens reflect genuine habit or are driven by clickbait-y posts populating sister app Instagram.
Users are now more splintered than ever, and overcoming the network effects Elon Musk bought was never going to be easy. It’s probably why he paid out $44 billion in the first place, to secure the legacy advantage and promote his own posts.
Still, social media is going through a broader reckoning. The engagement algorithms shaping online life have been blamed for dividing people, radicalizing them, making us lonelier — even enabling atrocities. Regulators are increasingly uneasy about so much power in so few hands.
The user experience has deteriorated, too. Facebook feels useful mainly for selling an old dresser, plus an unwanted side of AI slop. Instagram and TikTok may be entertaining, but they’re hardly reliable ecosystems for a pulse on current events. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst outcome if more of us simply logged off and touched grass.
Or maybe, as Wang hopes, the internet can still be rebuilt into something better, a place where people control their algorithms instead of being controlled by them.
The move-fast-and-break-things era is ending. The next social media winner will have to prove that scale and sustainability can coexist. The old model captured our attention. The next one will have to earn it.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News.
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