While Meta's Threads has long looked like the most plausible candidate to replace Twitter (now X), it may be a project incubated within Twitter that ends up being the big winner in the latest exodus from the former bird app.

According to decentralized social media project Bluesky, half a million new users joined it in one day last week after having originally been championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The Twitter-like app jumped into the top five most downloaded apps on the U.S. App Store and saw huge gains also in Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan, among many other regions.

But, according to Bluesky reports, it acquired more than 1.2 million users in just two days.

The new buzz came after the company updated information on X's new changes to the blocking feature. Soon, those you have blocked within the app will still be able to view your posts, though they won't be able to engage with them. Here, X's justification is that blocked users will find a way to view your posts if they log onto another account, thus there's no need for the company to support this feature under its block option.

Clearly, many users are pretty opposed to these policies and have come out in droves to Meta's Threads for the same reasons X has become more restrictive, namely by blocking people.

From a UI perspective, Bluesky is closest to the old Twitter, using essentially the same source code but built on a wholly different connective architecture that provides greater customization and personalization.
Bluesky has only about 12 million total users, but it has had a couple of big spiking curves in interest recently, first at the tail end of when X was banned in Brazil, and now following through on its blocking changes.

Perhaps most interestingly, and certainly of most concern for X, Bluesky is also picking up steam in Japan, which is X's second-biggest user market.

If Bluesky does attract an audience in both Brazil and Japan, that might undercut X's audiences, which are already slipping in parts of the country.

Of course, on 12 million users, Bluesky is pretty far from where Threads is now at 200 million monthly actives, and X itself counts 500 million MAU. Even so, however, it is gaining ground. And given Threads still seems tentative about how to fully embrace real-time news discussion, perhaps the door is open for Bluesky to make a more serious push in that direction.

And perhaps that is the shot in the arm decentralized social media needs to be taken seriously in the space.
The problem for decentralized social apps is that regular users simply don't care about the extra control and customization afforded via these options, since most just want to log on and start reading. Added steps of choosing a server or algorithm, central to this push, serve more as an annoyance to non-tech users, and that has been an impediment to mainstream adoption.

But if more conversations start moving there, maybe that will deliver the momentum required to make people's ears prick up.

People don't like extra steps, but they want to be in on the trending discussions, and maybe this push will see Bluesky get a real, significant audience, which will then draw a bigger crowd.

It's got some way to go, but it's another interesting wrinkle in the broader real-time social app push.