The chief operating officer of Bluesky has stated in a CNBC interview that the platform does not intend to replicate the product models of Meta's Threads or X.
The platform is moving away from a universal public square content ecosystem, opting instead to focus deeply on niche communities operated autonomously by users.
Impacted by a decline in user activity, Bluesky plans to iterate its product and enhance video-related features.
Bluesky originated as an internal project at the former Twitter. Following Elon Musk's acquisition and rebranding of the platform to X, Bluesky emerged as a formal competitor.
However, after two years of operation, its global user base is only about one-tenth that of X. Bluesky's COO, Wang Ross, revealed in a CNBC interview that the platform is no longer aiming to compete directly with X and is instead drawing inspiration from the community forum model of Reddit.
Speaking on the sidelines of the South by Southwest conference in London this Wednesday, Wang Ross stated, "The internet landscape changes rapidly. We will not replicate old social products or stubbornly chase the scale of competitors."
She indicated that Bluesky will abandon the "universal public square" feed format championed by X and Threads, pivoting to become a tool for discovering quality content.
"Through our operations, we realized that a public square is not our direction. The platform's core value lies in content discovery, and products like Reddit have been a great inspiration," she said. "A single stage where posters perform and the rest of the users watch is not real social interaction. That model is still stuck in the medieval era of the internet."
Reddit launched in 2005, branding itself as the "front page of the internet." It relies on a vast array of niche subdivisions (subreddits) to cover all categories of topics. The company completed its initial public offering in 2024, with its current stock price around $170 per share.
Platform Background
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber: "We turned an internal Twitter R&D project into an industry competitor, accomplishing what many saw as impossible."
Bluesky's ecosystem is built on the open-source AT Protocol, allowing developers to independently build applications, services, and communities while controlling content permissions. The project was initiated internally at Twitter in 2019 with funding from co-founder Jack Dorsey and was spun off independently in 2021. Following Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022, the cooperative agreement between the parties was terminated.
In April 2025, Bluesky completed a $100 million Series B funding round. However, data from last October shows that daily active mobile users have declined by 40% over the past twelve months.
According to statistics from a former R&D lead who publishes platform data, the number of active posting users has fallen from a peak of 1.4 million in late 2024 to about 600,000 currently.
The platform had 43 million global registered users in March, while X is estimated to have 450 million global users. Meta's Threads, incubated via Instagram and launched in 2023, reported monthly active users exceeding 400 million last year according to official data.
Addressing the user decline, Wang Ross explained, "Many social products experience a similar retention trajectory: a surge in users driven by a hot topic, followed by a cooling-off and stabilization, ultimately settling at a baseline far higher than pre-boom levels. It's not a one-way downward slide."
She disclosed to CNBC that Bluesky urgently needs product upgrades and to address its video shortcomings, focusing on improving video upload speeds and the maximum duration for a single post.
"Video is our weakness, but it's also the breakthrough point. The biggest challenge often contains the greatest opportunity," she said.
Regarding commercialization, the platform has not completely ruled out an advertising model, but Wang Ross stated plainly: "Many peers treat ad monetization as if they've struck oil, pursuing it fanatically."
Comments