X (formerly Twitter) vs Bluesky

The battle of the micro-bloggers

-  ZAK STOREY

IT'S A DANGEROUS business, getting up each morning and heading onto the internet. If you don't keep your feet, there's no telling what dark alley of Reddit you might be swept off to. Social media is divisive right now. From Meta announcing that it's getting rid of its factcheckers, to AI profiles springing up and pretending to be human, to algorithms perpetually dripfeeding you 10-second dopamine reels, it's a challenge to find somewhere that truly is 'social' by its very definition.

With that in mind, and the mass exodus currently erupting from X (formerly Twitter), we decided that it was about time Maximum PC cautiously waded into the shallows and had a look at the founding father of microblogging in today's age, and how it compares to the new kid on the block, Bluesky.

X has changed dramatically since its initial conception and its purchase by Elon Musk. From paywalls stopping direct messages and more advanced features, to algorithm shifts and advertisements running rampant, what Twitter was, to what X is now, is wildly different. It's still a social media platform, but one that has radically shifted, evolving into something very different.

To be clear, we've seen these kind of mass exoduses before. Social media users often flock to other, more modern platforms in the hopes of finding something new, something better, or something closer to what once was:. This has happened with Mastodon, Threads, and now it's Bluesky's turn.

CENTRALIZED VS DECENTRALIZED

Honestly, this very heading could have a feature dedicated to it in its entirety. The differences between Bluesky and X are deep-routed and intrinsic to the platforms, not necessarily in the content that's shared, but in how they operate at a fundamental level.