The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms

On Tuesday morning, the social media platform Bluesky experienced back-to-back outages that prevented feeds from loading for many users around the world.

An initial outage started at about 6AM ET, as tracked by Downdetector, lasting about 40 minutes, and then things crashed again at about 8AM. Bluesky experienced another major outage on April 24th that lasted for around an hour, which the company attributed to PDS networking problems.

Bluesky experienced a major outage on Thursday evening that lasted around an hour.

On my desktop browser, my Bluesky feed wouldn’t load at all, just showing a spinning loading circle. I saw something similar with the mobile app; I could log in, but when I did, the feed didn’t show. Other Verge colleagues were also experiencing issues. Now, though, it looks like things have fully recovered.

Bluesky is updating its app to version 1.100, and the update includes a more comprehensive search page and new chat reactions.

The search page is now known as “Explore,” where you can find trending topics, suggested accounts, and starter packs to jump-start stuff for you to follow on the app. This new Explore page still lets you search from the top, but now, the first thing you see under the search bar are a list of top trends and that may have a tag emphasizing how “hot” or “new” something is.

Tapbots, the developer behind the well-loved Tweetbot and Ivory apps for Twitter and Mastodon, is working on an iOS and Mac app for Bluesky called Phoenix, as spotted by MacStories. The company plans to release the app this summer and says it will open a “limited public alpha as soon as we can.”

This isn’t a move away from Mastodon; after Phoenix is out, Tapbots plans to develop both Ivory and Phoenix concurrently. “Mastodon is our home on the social web and we will continue to invest our time there,” Tapbots says in a Q&A on the Phoenix landing page. “Since the incredible growth of Bluesky in the past year, our customer base has become split between the two services and for us to continue to thrive as a company, we must support both. Unfortunately, we can’t survive on Mastodon alone.”

The NFL told the New England Patriots to shut down the team’s Bluesky account. Patriots VP of content Fred Kirsch said the team was told that Bluesky is “not an approved social media platform for the NFL yet,” addressing a fan question on a January 16th episode of the Patriots Unfiltered podcast, as spotted by Awful Announcing.

Kirsch said the team “briefly” had a Bluesky account before the league asked it to take the account down. The NFL told Front Office Sports in November it was aware of Bluesky but had no presence there, Awful Announcing notes. The league declined to comment when we reached out.

Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The project aims to raise $30 million over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized network powering Bluesky.

The raised funds will go toward launching a public interest foundation to support the project, while creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky users, developers, and researchers access to the content and data posted “no matter what the company decides to do in the future.”

As a special holiday treat, on December 25th, the social media app Bluesky announced that it has added a new feature to its mobile app: a list of Trending topics that lets you know what subjects are popular among its users.

The new feature can be found by selecting the search icon (the magnifying glass), which appears at the bottom of the screen on the mobile app and on the left sidebar on the web. Lists of Trending and Recommended subjects now appear below the search bar. Tap on any topic, and you will be able to access the associated posts. When I tried it, choices among the top five included Christmas and Nosferatu (not an unexpected selection of topics but an interesting juxtaposition).

Bluesky now has a specific tab for mentions in your notifications as part of the app’s just-released 1.96 update. With the mentions tab, it’s much easier to see your replies or conversations you’ve been tagged in on the platform.

Speaking of replies, update 1.96 lets you easily access settings that let you control how replies on posts appear to you. Replies can be linear, meaning they show up one post after another, or threaded, which means they will appear in indented threads (kind of like how they appear on Reddit). You can also sort replies by newest, oldest, most-liked, “hot,” and “random” (which Bluesky also calls “Poster’s Roulette”).

Threads is about to begin testing the ability to schedule posts, according to Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. “Replies cannot be scheduled,” he added, explaining that “we want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversation.”

Mosseri also makes sure to note that Instagram has been working on this feature “for months.” I’m choosing to take as a sign that the Instagram chief is fed up with the notion that Bluesky is the motivating factor behind every new improvement that comes to Threads. Last week, Threads introduced curated collections of people to follow, which drew comparisons to Bluesky’s starter packs.

Sub.club, which lets fediverse creators offer paid subscriptions and premium content and launched at the end of August, is already shutting down. “With regret, we will be winding down this project over the next few weeks,” the sub.club team announced last week. Creators using the service will be “fully paid,” but sub.club feeds will stop working “by the end of January.”

As I wrote when I first covered sub.club, the service seemed like an interesting way to let people on the fediverse more easily monetize their audience without having to point them toward other platforms like Patreon. But the group that built it, The BLVD, has run out of funding.

In a series of Threads posts this afternoon, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says users shouldn’t trust images they see online because AI is “clearly producing” content that’s easily mistaken for reality. Because of that, he says users should consider the source, and social platforms should help with that.

“Our role as internet platforms is to label content generated as AI as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but he admits “some content” will be missed by those labels. Because of that, platforms “must also provide context about who is sharing” so users can decide how much to trust their content.

You can now follow fediverse accounts on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced. Threads rolled out fediverse users’ likes and replies in a very limited way at first, and it’s the same here — fediverse posts won’t appear in your feeds, and you can only follow those accounts if they’ve interacted with a post on Threads.

While fediverse posts won’t show in feeds, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says their profile and posts do appear on Threads, and you have the option to get notifications when they publish. That’s something, at least. Mosseri posted a video of what the process looks like:

Threads is rolling out a search update globally over the next few weeks that will let users filter searches to a specific profile and within date ranges. The existing search built into Threads has been a basic keyword search to find trending topics, posts, or accounts, with “Top” and “Recent” sorting options.

The updated version adds a settings icon to the search bar that, when tapped, brings up “After date,” “Before date,” and “From profile” options.