Bluesky hit 15 million users this week. And then 16 million. The vibes on Bluesky are immaculate, and it seems to have a real and renewed chance to be the place that replaces Twitter for a lot of people. But then there’s Threads, which grew by approximately one Bluesky just this month. There’s also Mastodon, which is still hanging around, and of course there’s X. There are more options than ever, and it’s more confusing than ever.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and make sense of all this change. Will all this new growth and momentum help Bluesky grow not just as an app but as a decentralized protocol? Is it a real threat to ActivityPub and the notion of the fediverse? Do we know yet what kind of social network wants to be? And if you’re looking for a place to post, like, reply, and read, where should you go? We don’t have all the answers, but we have plenty of ideas.
(By the way: we recorded this episode on Wednesday, a little earlier than normal, and all of this is moving so fast that a couple of our numbers are out of date. Keep it locked on The Verge as things change!)
After that, The Verge’s Kylie Robison joins the show to help us pilot a new segment called “Show And Tell.” (It shouldn’t be called that – please help us rename it.) Each of the hosts brings a story they’re into right now and explains it to the rest of us, and then we all talk about it. We show and tell our way through Apple’s latest smart home plans, the AI model slowdown, and how it’s possible that “Just Eat sold Grubhub to Wonder” is a real sentence.
Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about some of the latest MKBHD controversy, and our ethics policy surrounding these stories. We also talk about Freevee going 90, the nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency, and what’s going on with Boost Mobile.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Bluesky and Threads and social:
- Twitter’s succession: all the news about alternative social media platforms Bluesky adds 700,000 new users in a weekOne million people have joined Bluesky in the past week.Bluesky is having its “highest traffic day ever.”
And in Show and Tell:
- David Pierce’s pick: Apple’s rumored six-inch ‘AI wall tablet’ could control your smart home by March 2025Kylie Robison’s pick, from Bloomberg: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AINilay Patel’s pick: Just Eat is selling Grubhub to Marc Lore’s Wonder for $650MAnother good read on Wonder, from New York: Wonder Is Everywhere, But What Is It?
And in the lightning round:
