Since 2006, X, formerly known as Twitter, has remained a well-known social media app that people use for discourse over any subject. Over recent years, however, the app has received lots of controversy over several of its changes, as well as its new owner Elon Musk. After buying it in 2022, many have gone out to complain about the decisions that Musk has made while owning the app, and various companies have even gone out to create X-adjacent apps that attempt to approve upon X’s formula as an app.

Threads is one of these, an Instagram app that is used for the purpose of sharing public conversation with thousands of users. Upon launch, it was a clear take on the Twitter format, but it had lots of new downloads. While X currently still boasts a higher amount of users and budget, Threads is slowly making its way up to the top.

Now, very recently, a newer app has released with a take on the Twitter format, that being Bluesky. Upon release, like Threads, it has gained lots of traction and new users. As an app, it seems that its main goal is to be an app that builds off of the current X formula, but decentralized. This means that fellow users can control the content that they see within their page.

As an app, this can make the content you see be catered to what you want. This is something that many people, including me, liked about Bluesky upon hearing of its release. Being on X, I have seen lots of bot content within the app that you could not really avoid, as bots currently are everywhere on the app. Musk has not fixed this issue, instead focusing on more questionable changes, like proposing the complete removal of the block button and its function, a straight-up bad idea that will make others still be able to see the content of someone they have blocked.

With the idea of Bluesky keeping the block button and allowing the user to be able to cater to the content they want to see, Bluesky already seems like a fantastic idea and competitor to X. However, through this specific idea is what I and many people would like to see, their concept for this may have not been carried out in the best way.

“Bluesky is instead going much harder on banning stuff,” Cooper Clayton (’25), a user of X, says. “it makes the app almost like Facebook, I think they have gone too far opposite of the direction they wanted. I think they just moderated too hard.”

Currently, Bluesky as an app feels like it is catered too much towards taking away as much content as possible. As of looking through the app, Clayton and I’s experience have been similar, seeing content similar to what you would see on Facebook, mainly for older audiences. It is not that this content should not exist, far from it. However, it feels overly recommended on the app.

“No one wanted the ‘nice version’ of Twitter,” Clayton (’25) said. “We just wanted Twitter, the good Twitter, like from 2021.”

While Bluesky may have potential to be the successful competitor to X, its agenda to moderate as much as possible has become its detriment for certain users, which may push them away. However, as a competitor, allowing users to customize what they are able to see is an immediate advantage over Musk’s X, I think it just needs more users and time to make updates and adjustments to fully see this vision.

As an app, Bluesky has already started to get a large user count, heavily decreasing X’s. It is no where near taking over X, but it has proven to has its advantages and disadvantages over it.