The post-Twitter era has split text-based social media into two fundamentally different philosophies—for the first time, choosing where to post is a structural decision about ownership, reach, and long-term risk. Bluesky reached 41.41 million users by December 2025, while Threads hit 400 million MAU by August 2025, creating distinct competitive positions.
The Bluesky vs Threads decision is a choice between opposite architectural approaches: one built on the decentralized AT Protocol that gives creators decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and personal data servers for audience portability, the other backed by Meta's multi-billion dollar infrastructure and the world's largest social graph. The right answer depends on what you're building and who you want around you.
Bluesky: Ownership-First Social for Niche Builders
Bluesky's core promise is portability: your identity and social graph can move with you, rather than living at the mercy of a single platform.
The platform reached 41.41 million users by end of 2025, with roughly 3.5 million DAU. Those numbers look modest next to Threads, but the engagement story tells a different tale: users created 1.41 billion posts in 2025 alone, 61% of all posts ever published on the platform. This is a community that shows up and participates.
What the AT Protocol Actually Means for Builders
Your Bluesky account is tied to a Decentralized Identifier (DID): a permanent, cryptographically secure ID that you control. Your handle is just a DID pointer. Per the AT Protocol overview, your posts, follows, and social connections live in signed repositories that move with you.
If you migrate to a different server, your followers migrate because they follow your DID, not a server-specific username. This portability works without permission from your original host.
The practical upside showed itself during an April 2025 outage: users running their own Personal Data Servers were unaffected. The downside is real too. Self-hosting currently means VPS deployment, managing domains and DNS, and handling SQLite backups. That's feasible for dedicated technical builders, but far from trivial for most people today.
Who Gravitates Here and Why
Bluesky attracts technologists, journalists, developers, and early adopters who prioritize substantive conversation over viral reach. Text posts perform particularly well on Bluesky, and the community rewards depth and dialogue: long-form commentary, technical analysis, and peer-to-peer discussion thrive here.
Threads: Meta's Scale Machine for Broad Reach
Threads' advantage is distribution: Meta can show your post to people who never asked to see you, which makes it easier to grow quickly from zero.
Threads uses Meta's infrastructure and algorithmic distribution to surface content beyond existing followers through its "For You" feed. In June 2025, Threads saw 115.1 million daily active users, marking a 127.8% year-over-year increase per Similarweb data. By August 2025, Threads hit 400 million MAU, and by September it was outpacing X in daily active users on mobile.
The Instagram Connection: Advantage and Anchor
Threads is welded to Instagram. That integration is a growth accelerator, and also a dependency you can't easily unwind.
Joining Threads requires an Instagram account. When you sign up, your Instagram followers can get notified and follow you on Threads with one tap. Your verification badge can transfer over. This gives Instagram-native creators a meaningful discovery advantage, even though followers still choose to follow rather than automatically transferring.
The trade-off is platform dependency. Deleting Threads can require Instagram deletion, though you can deactivate Threads to make the profile invisible. An Instagram suspension can disable Threads. Data collected on Threads is Meta-shared data for ad targeting, algorithm improvement, and AI training, per Meta policy. One policy issue can cascade accounts across your Meta presence.
Who Benefits Most
Threads works best when you want fast distribution and already have gravity on Instagram.
It supports text, photos, and videos, plus group messaging up to 50 people. For posting formats like character limits, carousel sizes, and video constraints, Meta changes details frequently across regions and app versions—the most reliable place to confirm current limits is Meta's own Threads help and official product updates. Creator analytics are built in and track views, replies, reposts, and audience breakdowns without third-party tools. Bluesky still offers no analytics in the core product, which is a meaningful day-to-day gap for teams tracking content performance.
Bluesky vs Threads: Head-to-Head on What Matters
The comparison that matters for builders goes beyond a feature checklist. Here's how these platforms stack up across five dimensions that shape long-term platform strategy.
Audience and Discoverability
Starting from zero feels different on each platform.
On Threads, Meta's ranking system pulls in posts from followed accounts and recommended accounts, creating opportunities for new creators. The For You feed explicitly surfaces posts from outside your network. Buffer analysis suggests visibility comes from continued algorithmic testing beyond the initial posting window, based on engagement signals and interests.
Bluesky takes a community-curated approach. Your primary discovery paths are custom feeds—user-made algorithmic filters around topics or themes—and Starter Packs, curated bundles of recommended accounts that new users can follow in one click. Getting included in a popular Starter Pack is one of the fastest ways to go from invisible to discoverable. Bluesky has also discussed Discover improvements planned for 2026, including topic tagging, to deliver higher-quality recommendations.
Feed Control and Algorithmic Dynamics
Threads runs on a centralized algorithm that determines what you see and who sees you. Meta introduced "Dear Algo," an AI-driven personalization layer that gives Meta deeper control over content distribution. For creators, reach depends on Meta's shifting priorities—those priorities tend to align with advertising revenue as ads expand on Threads.
Bluesky's Following feed is purely chronological, with posts in reverse-chronological order from accounts you follow. Beyond that, custom feeds let people subscribe to multiple algorithms of their choosing. If your content matches a popular feed's criteria, you can gain visibility even with very few followers.
Data Ownership and Platform Philosophy
This dimension reveals the sharpest divide between the two platforms.
Bluesky's privacy policy emphasizes minimal data collection and user control. Bluesky's Terms of Service confirm users retain ownership of their content. You can export data, including your social graph, and the protocol architecture means the export is functional: your account is based on a DID you control, which allows migration to another server while keeping followers.
Threads collects more personal data including activity patterns, device identifiers, location, and content interactions. Meta's privacy policy describes cross-service sharing across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and other Meta services for ads, ranking systems, product improvement, and AI work. You can export through Accounts Center, but there is no portable identity: you cannot move your account and followers to a competing platform.
Engagement Quality
Bluesky tends to trade reach for signal, while Threads trades signal for reach.
On Bluesky, you'll usually see fewer responses but more substantive dialogue. After Bluesky deployed a reply-filtering system that deprioritized toxic replies behind an extra click, daily reports of antisocial behavior dropped 79%. Threads provides faster top-of-funnel exposure and broader reach, but interactions tend to be quicker and shallower, with the algorithm rewarding viral potential over conversation quality.
Growth Trajectory and Platform Risk
Threads is durable because Meta is durable; Bluesky is resilient because its protocol can outlive any single company.
Meta plans to spend $115–135B on capex in 2026. Threads will survive. The question is what it becomes as advertising expands and organic reach compresses, following patterns Facebook established in the 2010s.
Bluesky operates as a Public Benefit Corp funded by roughly $36M raised across three rounds. The platform plans to monetize through subscriptions and creator payments while refusing AI training. That's a principled position, but this revenue model has limited precedent at massive scale and will likely require more funding.
The AT Protocol provides a strategic foundation: even if the company pivots, your data and identity can theoretically persist on the network. However, the same April 2025 outage showed most users still depend on Bluesky's official infrastructure, so that protection is currently more meaningful for builders willing to self-host.
Which Platform Fits Your Scenario
The right choice depends on your situation, not on which platform is "better" in the abstract.
Starting from Zero with a Niche Audience
Bluesky's custom feeds and Starter Packs give you multiple discovery paths into engaged communities. Growth can be slower, but more intentional—every follower chose to be there.
Building on an Existing Instagram Audience
Threads gives you immediate reach through notification-based follow prompts and easy cross-posting. Use that momentum, but diversify to Bluesky in parallel to reduce single-platform dependency.
In practice, that means cross-posting your best Threads posts to Bluesky, engaging inside relevant custom feeds, and creating a Starter Pack so new Bluesky users can find your corner of the platform quickly.
Privacy and Data Ownership Are Non-Negotiable
Bluesky provides cryptographic ownership guarantees through DIDs and an exportable social graph that Threads cannot match. The trade-offs are slower growth, fewer built-in features, and unproven long-term monetization.
Building for a Developer Community
Bluesky's open API allows 5,000 write points per hour compared to Threads' 250 posts per 24 hours—a significant difference. Domain verification, community moderation tools, and AT Protocol extensibility make it a natural home for technical communities.
Owning Your Audience Long-Term
Bluesky's decentralized architecture means your identity, content, and social graph are portable via DIDs and Personal Data Servers. Threads offers data export, but no functional migration path. For a five-year bet, protocol-level ownership beats policy-level promises.
Your Next Move in the Bluesky vs Threads Decision
Most builders will benefit from presence on both platforms with differentiated effort: Threads for broad reach while algorithmic distribution remains favorable, and Bluesky for deep community engagement and long-term audience independence. But neither platform turns followers into owned audience by default—and that's the gap that decides whether your social presence becomes a business.
The followers you build on Bluesky or Threads are borrowing space in someone else's system. The moment you want to reach them on your terms—send an announcement, launch a product, move platforms entirely—you're back to asking permission. The fix is building a destination you control: a community hub, a membership tool, or a subscriber portal that sits behind your social presence and captures the audience you've already earned.
That's where Lovable comes in. With Agent Mode's autonomous AI development and Visual Edits for real-time UI tweaks, you can build a custom community platform, gated content hub, or email-capture tool in hours—not months. No developer required, and no monthly SaaS subscription eating into margins before you've validated demand.
Pick your platform. Then build the destination that makes it matter. Start building with Lovable today.
