• by Colin Kirkland , November 27, 2024

As Bluesky continues to make announcements regarding its expanding user base, Meta's Threads app is also becoming a major contender in the social microblogging space -- citing 35 million sign-ups in November, with sign-ups increasing over the past two weeks.

According to Threads, the social-media app has received over a million new users each day for the past three months, marking a notable trend following the U.S. presidential election. More X users are choosing to distance themselves from Elon Musk's operation as the billionaire further aligns himself with president-elect Donald Trump.

Per this ongoing development, X users are also flocking to Bluesky, which recently passed 20 million users -- a notable increase in its user base, but still small when considering the hundreds of millions of active users on Threads and X.

Despite Bluesky's much smaller user base, the budding word-of-mouth social platform’s recent growth attracted interest for a new investment round soon after the company raised $15 million in Series A funding, Axios reports.

Because of this, Bluesky is putting newfound pressure on Threads -- especially considering the flurry of platform updates that Meta has been announcing.

On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads is testing an option that allows users to choose their default feed, which mirrors similar offerings on both X and Bluesky.

A few days before, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted on Threads that the company is testing “a couple of long-overdue improvements” to its Search and Trending Now functions, which include AI summaries of what people are discussing and the ability to search for posts from a single account or within a specific date range.

Threads is also planning to begin allowing advertisers to create and publish ads on the platform in an effort to drive revenue for the company.

Ultimately, as competition among these growing microblogging social apps continues, it is important to look beyond initial sign-ups to consider the amount of users who are engaging regularly with each platform.