The scramble to figure out where to be on social media is a question I’d rather not be worrying about to be honest, but we are where we are
Meta dropped Threads on the fifth and hit 100 million signups in days. Bluesky is open to anybody now, no waitlist. Mastodon is still doing its quiet, distributed thing. And Twitter is still Twitter, but smaller and stranger.
Threads is the obvious one if you’re thinking like a marketer. Meta’s got scale, distribution, and the algorithm is friendly to first-day adoption. We pushed some content there in the first week. The follower growth was fast. The engagement was… fine. But it’s mostly people testing, reposting what they said on Twitter, or just trying to find their friends. The conversation depth isn’t there yet. It feels like LinkedIn on day one. Technically impressive, but the interesting people haven’t figured out what to do with it. I’m not optimistic that they will, not quickly. Meta owns the network effect, but they don’t own novelty.
Bluesky is different. I’m spending more time there, and so are a lot of people that I follow. The conversations are more grown-up. You can build custom feeds. The moderation is decentralised. It’s got some of the early-internet energy that Twitter had before it became a broadcast platform. But the user base is still journalists, technologists, and Twitter refugees. There’s no mainstream audience. If you’re trying to reach ordinary people, Bluesky isn’t it yet. And the federation model means that whether Bluesky survives as a company is less important than whether the protocol survives.
Mastodon is the third way. Decentralised, no algorithm, no ads, run by volunteers and small communities. I’ve got an account on a few instances. The communities are genuinely thoughtful. But it’s not a place where you build an audience in the traditional sense. It’s a place where you have conversations with people who’ve explicitly chosen to be there. Different value.
For a technology agency, especially one that talks about WordPress, AI, and personalisation, this matters differently than it would for a B2C brand. Our audience is practitioners, other builders, other agency people. Those people are on Twitter (still), Bluesky (increasingly), and nowhere in particular on Threads. Twitter lost people, not conversations. Bluesky gained conversations. Threads gained signups.
My personal read, and I might be wrong on this, is that Bluesky will either become something serious or disappear. Threads will plateau at “another Meta platform”, doing what Meta platforms do (acquire users, keep them loose, squeeze ads later). Mastodon will stay weird and good for the people who want that.
The question for an agency leader is: do you want to be where the noise is, or where the signal is? And which of your audiences care? I could put effort into Threads and get visibility with people who are just testing it. I could put effort into Bluesky and have real conversations with people who chose to be there. I can’t do both well.
My answer, for now: Twitter while it lasts, Bluesky where I’m spending time anyway, Threads for monitoring only. That might change. The whole landscape could shuffle again in six months. But the principle stays the same. Be honest about where your people are, and whether they’re there to talk or just to scroll.
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