Bluesky Hits 1 Million Installs As Competition With Threads Heats Up

Social media is an ever-evolving landscape that sees some once-vaunted sites laid low, and fresh upstarts that soon come to rule the proverbial roost. With this in mind, there are now multiple sites and applications out there that are looking to challenge Twitter's dominance of the micro-blogging scene, with Bluesky and Threads being two of the most noticeable.

Created by Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky features all of the bells and whistles many enjoy from Twitter. Becoming available in February for iPhone users, and April for Android, Bluesky is actually still in an invite-only stage, and if one is interested in using the service, you'll need to sign up on a waiting list. Despite this fact, Bluesky has recently crossed the threshold of one million installs, as reported by data.ai. This is impressive considering that Bluesky isn't yet entirely available to the public. Still, Bluesky now has some stiff competition in the form of Meta's Threads, which itself has experienced explosive growth in an incredibly short amount of time.

Though Bluesky certainly has plenty of experience within the company on account of Jack Dorsey, Threads has the backing of Meta, which is best known for Facebook and Instagram. Although Bluesky has accumulated an impressive one million downloads, Threads has seen over 55 million users in less than 48 hours. Of course, this makes perfect sense, knowing that the download for Threads is entirely open to the public, and since Threads is tethered to an Instagram account, many have found the process much easier than signing up on a waitlist to simply get access to an application.

Both Bluesky and Threads still have a long way to go to topple Twitter, which according to Statista, had around 368 million monthly users as of December 2022, which is projected to decrease to 335 million by 2024. However, it will be interesting to see which one of these Twitter clones will come to claim a sizable chunk of social media users, as Twitter's rather public decline and long list of well-documented problems is certainly causing quite a stir and vacuum among micro-bloggers.

{Featured image by JD Lasica via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0}