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

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber will step aside

2026-03-09T16:25:34-04:00

Bluesky Social Jay Graber speaks on stage during 2025 Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Summit & Gala at Jacob Javits Center on June 05, 2025 in New York City. () | Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company

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 a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mastodon snags Bluesky’s starter packs feature and includes the ability to opt out

2026-02-19T10:01:41-05:00

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 b …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Threads adds communities to put your interests front and center

2025-10-02T13:31:08-04:00

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 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Bluesky can really keep up with the news now that it has activity notifications

2025-07-07T15:03:12-04:00

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.

That goes …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Bluesky is testing a new ‘live’ indicator for streamers and sports

2025-05-19T16:32:49-04:00

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, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Bluesky is having an up and down Tuesday morning

2025-04-29T10:53:28-04:00

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.

Many of us here at The Verge were unable to refresh our Bluesky feeds across the desktop web service, or Bluesky's iOS and Android apps, although its pages loaded while logged out, and some self-hosted users …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Bluesky is back up after a major outage

2025-04-24T20:01:48-04:00

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.

In a 6:55PM ET message on its status page, Bluesky said that that there were "major PDS networking problems" and that "we are investigating a major outage with Bluesky hosted PDS instances." In a 7:38PM ET message, it said that "we have identified a like …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Bluesky gets a revamped search page and emoji reactions in DMs

2025-04-10T18:18:20-04:00

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.

There's also a shortcut at the top to edit interests that inform what you see on the Explore page, but you can hide that and adjust your interests …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Tweetbot’s developers are making a Bluesky app

2025-03-05T18:27:10-05:00

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 spl …

Read the full story at The Verge.

NFL teams can’t use Bluesky

2025-01-22T12:17:17-05:00

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.

Football teams are allowed to post on o …

Read the full story at The Verge.