Yeah, I’d say that Meta is pretty clearly concerned about the rising threat of Bluesky, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announcing that it’s testing out a new option that will enable users to select any feed, including their “Following” stream, as their default on Threads.
Which is a significant move, because Meta generates a lot more engagement from its AI-defined “For You” feeds in its apps, which include recommended content to keep users scrolling.
The question is, do people actually have a better experience in that feed, with a heap of content pushed into their feeds that they may or may not be interested in, or would users like it more if they only saw the latest updates from profiles that they follow?
This is a difficult weigh-up for Meta, because as noted, virtually all of the engagement gains on Facebook and Instagram of late have come from AI-based recommendations being pushed into user feeds. Facebook engagement had been steadily declining for years, before it started injecting recommended posts, while around 50% of your main IG feed is now AI-recommended content.
Meta, then, seemingly gleans far more benefit from these recommendations, so enabling users to side-step that seems like a big step.
But Bluesky lets you default to a “Following” feed, as does X. As such, maybe, in a real-time social environment, this is a better way to go, while it would also be another way to help users grow their followings, as users look to populate this stream.
Because with “For You” being the default, there’s much less reason for users to follow individual profiles, because the algorithm does all the work for them in this respect. Last week, Threads also announced that its “rebalancing” its feed ranking algorithm to prioritize content from people that you follow, with the emphasis of both of these moves seemingly being to help users grow their audience in the app.
So will it work? Will following feeds be a better option, or will most users just keep using the “For You” stream in the app?
It’s a risky move from Meta, as I suspect that once people switch to the “Following” default, and stop being exposed to recommended posts, many will indeed stick with it.
That could drive down overall time spent in the app, but maybe, the pay off of enabling more creators to build bigger followings will help to negate the growth momentum of Bluesky, and keep them more aligned to Threads instead.
Either way, given the raft of updates from Threads over the past week, it’s pretty clear that it’s more than a little spooked by Bluesky’s sudden growth spurt.
