Threads Vs. Bluesky: Which Is The Best Alternative To X/Twitter?

For a long time, if you were looking for a "real time" social media app to use to keep up with news stories and major pop culture events as they happen, there was only one choice: X, the platform formally known as Twitter. Its microblogging format was borderline addictive, but in time, the perception was that the environment was becoming increasingly toxic. That perception worsened once Tesla/SpaceX/StarLink magnate Elon Musk engaged in a hostile takeover of Twitter in 2022, eventually renaming the platform X while reinstating accounts that had been banned for all sorts of behavior.

These changes and an alteration to X's block functionality — blocks now apply only to interaction, not visibility — made many users hunger for an alternative platform. The blocking pivot caused rival Bluesky to gain 500,000 new signups the day after the change was implemented. Users wanted a replacement microblogging platform, which led to the creation of alternatives like Threads and the aforementioned Bluesky.

The best way to describe the appeal of Bluesky — besides it not being X — is that much care was taken to allow the user to customize their experience as much as possible. For content discovery, you can follow hashtags and user-created subscription lists curating various topics. Also, as an added benefit, as part of Bluesky's design with the goal of eventually being decentralized, you can tie your username to a domain name, allowing for a sort of verification feature since only those with access to the domain's DNS record can do this. Perhaps more interesting and more relevant to Bluesky's position as an X alternative, though, is how blocking works on the platform. Not only can you subscribe to user-maintained blocklists, but blocking also hides replies to you from blocked users for everyone, not just you.

Threads, meanwhile, is a Meta-owned offshoot of Instagram, using the same user account across both. It doesn't have Bluesky's heavy customization, but it has some distinguishing features. One is that it piggybacks onto Instagram's blocking system, which blocks not just the offending account, but all accounts made by the same user – Instagram hasn't quantified how this works. Threads also has higher limits for character count and video length: Up to 500 characters of text (compared to 240 characters on X's free tier or 300 characters on Bluesky), while videos are capped at five minutes (Bluesky's limit is three minutes while X's free tier has a limit of 140 seconds.) 

If you're mainly looking for something that can be described as X without the things that made you want to leave, or a more customizable version of X, then BlueSky is likely to be the best choice for you. The blocking features make it a lot easier to perform self-care while using the platform, especially the blocklists. If you're trying to avoided bigoted extremist accounts, overly tribal fans of certain pieces of media, and other purveyors of toxicity, then the best of the actively-maintained BlueSky blocklists make a huge difference. And even setting the blocking aside, if you want to be able to customize what you see — as opposed to what you don't see — then it's very easy to subscribe to hashtags, curated lists, and so on. Overall, if customization is what you want, then BlueSky is the pick.

Threads is probably best if you're already an active Instagram user and can leverage the cross-service account integration. After all, if you've already been an active Instagram user for years, then you've already curated your user experience a bit with follow and block choices that can easily be ported over to Threads. And if the changes to the blocking functionality on X drove you from that platform, you're definitely going to prefer Threads' implementation, which handles it the same way that Instagram did. Though Instagram's opaque about how it works, there's something satisfying about knowing you're blocking every account linked to the one you knowingly blocked.