My Twitter feed was full of "do you have a Bluesky invite?" type tweets this week, reminding me of the latest Twitter alternative to join the race for social-media domination.
But, if we're being honest here, Bluesky is really an alternative to Mastodon, not Twitter...
Bluesky, which requires an invite to use, made its way into 360K iOS and Android devices since rolling out in February, according to our estimates. The majority of downloads, though, came from the App Store as the Android version just launched a little over a week ago.
In comparison, Mastodon's official app was downloaded 150K times in the same period, and I don't think it's fair to compare it to Twitter's downloads, so I won't do that.
I haven't used Bluesky but from its screenshots, it looks identical to Twitter, which is already a bit better than Mastodon. Not that I think it'll be easy to beat Twitter at being Twitter, but at least it reduces some confusion.
I've said this before but it's worth repeating, the only way I see to replace Twitter is to invent something different, not to copy and paste.
But from a totally different point of view, it's been a while since the App Store saw an exciting invite-only launch. The last I can think of is Clubhouse. Oddly enough, an attempt at something different. Clubhouse announced a bunch of changes this week, so I'd say a failed attempt.
If you have a solid argument for why a copy of Twitter can dethrone the original I'd really like to hear it.
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