Bluesky’s quest to be the next Twitter

Image: Alex Parkin / The VergeBluesky hit 15 million users this week. And then 16 million. The vibes on Bluesky are immaculate, and it seems to have a real and renewed chance to be the place that replaces Twitter...

Nov 15, 2024 - 21:01

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On The Vergecast: checking in on the future of social, Apple’s smart home plans, AI slowdowns, and Project Gene5is.

By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Nov 15, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

Several social network logos, on a Vergecast background.

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Bluesky hit 15 million users this week. And then 16 million. The vibes on Bluesky are immaculate, and it seems to have a real and renewed chance to be the place that replaces Twitter for a lot of people. But then there’s Threads, which grew by approximately one Bluesky just this month. There’s also Mastodon, which is still hanging around, and of course there’s X. There are more options than ever, and it’s more confusing than ever.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and make sense of all this change. Will all this new growth and momentum help Bluesky grow not just as an app but as a decentralized protocol? Is it a real threat to ActivityPub and the notion of the fediverse? Do we know yet what kind of social network wants to be? And if you’re looking for a place to post, like, reply, and read, where should you go? We don’t have all the answers, but we have plenty of ideas.

(By the way: we recorded this episode on Wednesday, a little earlier than normal, and all of this is moving so fast that a couple of our numbers are out of date. Keep it locked on The Verge as things change!)

After that, The Verge’s Kylie Robison joins the show to help us pilot a new segment called “Show And Tell.” (It shouldn’t be called that – please help us rename it.) Each of the hosts brings a story they’re into right now and explains it to the rest of us, and then we all talk about it. We show and tell our way through Apple’s latest smart home plans, the AI model slowdown, and how it’s possible that “Just Eat sold Grubhub to Wonder” is a real sentence.

Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about some of the latest MKBHD controversy, and our ethics policy surrounding these stories. We also talk about Freevee going 90, the nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency, and what’s going on with Boost Mobile.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Bluesky and Threads and social:

And in Show and Tell:

And in the lightning round: