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

Jay Graber became the first CEO of Bluesky in 2021 when the network and its AT Protocol spun out from life as a Twitter research project to go independent, but now she’s leaving that role, as reported previously by Wired. While venture capitalist and former Automattic CEO Toni Schneider steps in as interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found, Graber says she will become Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer, focused on building new things for a platform that has gone from 30 million users about a year ago, to 40 million currently.

According to Graber, “Toni believes deeply in the Bluesky mission, and has been an advisor to the company and me personally for over a year. Both Automattic and True Ventures are also investors in Bluesky, and support the development of a more open, user-driven internet.”

Mastodon is introducing “Packs” to help you quickly find accounts to follow and fill up your feed. The decentralized social network announced the feature as part of the FediForum event on Tuesday. It will work similarly to Starter Packs on Bluesky, which offer curated lists of accounts you can follow based on categories, like verified users, podcasters, and journalists.

Mastodon will allow you to opt out of Packs, meaning other users can’t include your account in one. You’ll also receive a notification when someone adds you to a Pack, and, unlike Bluesky’s Starter Packs, you will be able to remove yourself from a Pack without reporting or blocking the user. Mastodon is working to make them available to developers of other ActivityPub-based applications as well.

Threads is testing a new feature called communities globally on its web platform and mobile apps, which will serve as dedicated spaces where you can find content or posts about your favorite topics. Starting today, you can explore different communities surrounding things like professional basketball, K-pop, books, TV shows, AI, and more.

You can join different communities on Threads and view feeds dedicated to each one, similar to the way different channels pop up on Reddit, or in X’s communities. When you join a community on Threads, the platform will label your profile, displaying your membership to other users. Threads will also pin that community’s posts to your feeds menu.

One thing that has been missing from Bluesky until now was the ability to turn on notifications for specific accounts, but now Activity Notifications are live. If you want to know every time The Verge or ESPN, or one of your friends posts, you can, just by toggling the bell icon on their profile page, along with an option to see notifications for just new posts or with replies included too.

It’s the kind of feature I’ve gotten used to on other platforms, especially Twitter, where news breakers have been able to keep their audiences updated from minute to minute, making it easier to follow interesting topics or developing stories.

Bluesky is making it easier to know when someone is livestreaming or when a live NBA event is happening with a new test that adds a red border to profile pics, along with a “live” callout below it. When you click a profile picture with that indicator, you’ll be taken out of Bluesky and to whatever live event is being promoted.

Bluesky COO Rose Wang announced yesterday that the feature was being tested for both the NBA’s new account on the platform; she added later that the test extends to the WNBA, too, as TechCrunch points out. Today, Bluesky says the badge will also appear for “a handful of accounts” when they post links to livestreams, including on YouTube and Twitch. It added that it plans to tweak the feature based on feedback before it launches it to all users.

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).