Since Tesla magnate Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and later rebranded it “X,” there has been a significant exodus of liberals and others on the political left who are unhappy with the new owner’s ostentatiously pro-MAGA politics. They are also displeased with the changes he has made to the platform, including offering a blue verification checkmark to anyone willing to fork over a monthly subscription fee. Many who had spent years building follower counts found it agonizingly difficult to leave, but when they did, these are the microblogging platforms they are generally choosing.
Threads
“Threads was the second most downloaded app in 2024” and is distinct from Twitter and Bluesky in that it “promotes non-political content,” said TechRound. Threads, with its owner Meta’s existing market power and user base, had an enormous leg up on other platforms that sought to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Musk’s Twitter. Meta made it easy for its X Instagram users to create a Threads account, which had Threads dubbed the “Twitter-killer app,” said Vox.
Launched in 2023, Threads uses “Instagram design flair, including the same Instagram font and icons” and “perhaps stands the best chance of any Twitter competitor yet” of dethroning the market leader. With 350 million active monthly Threads users as of May 2025, its “growth is helping to cement its place in the microblogging app ecosystem,” said TechCrunch. Not everyone is enthused, however. Threads is “all the worst parts of Instagram and Twitter,” in large part because “there is no way to view posts chronologically on the timeline — or even to limit your feed to posts from accounts you follow,” said Vice.
Bluesky
Bluesky began, ironically, as a research project of then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was “charged with building a decentralized standard for social media” and hoped that eventually “Twitter would adopt this standard itself,” said TechCrunch. Bluesky launched “as an invite-only service in 2023” and then “swiftly became a refuge for a coalition of leftists, liberals and never-Trumpers,” said Wired. One of its chief appeals, beyond escaping Musk, is that Bluesky “offers users the chance to more heavily moderate their experience.” That includes the “ability to select the algorithm that drives what you see, helping create custom feeds,” said The Guardian.
Bluesky is “cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati,” but its users “tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber,” said the Financial Times. However, many users see it as a refuge where they can manage their experience by blocking abusive accounts. Bluesky works by “creating a space where conversations aren’t immediately derailed by harassment or bad-faith arguments,” said Parker Molloy. The app has gone from 5 million to 35 million active monthly users between February 2024 and April 2025.
Mastodon
The decentralized platform Mastodon was one of the early beneficiaries of Musk’s “erratic leadership,” and in 2022 had “grown eight times its size in a matter of weeks, going from approximately 300,000 users in October to 2.5 million in November,” said CNN. One big obstacle to Mastodon’s growth has been that “problematic design choices will prove impossible to navigate for everyone but the most hard-core users,” said Fast Company. That’s in part because the app is a “network of independent servers called the Fediverse, all of them connected through a common open-source protocol.” New users need a tutorial to learn the ropes, and you have to pick a server when you sign up.
The “clumsy and confusing” sign-up process was simplified in 2023 when an update offered a “clearer choice of picking its default server of Mastodon.social or a specialized server based on different topics,” said ZDNET. But the app’s Musk-driven “initial growth spurt has since leveled off, and with around 880,000 active monthly users, “it has struggled to sustain that momentum,” said Newsweek. But for some users, that stalled growth might actually be for the best. Without the pressure to overtake X, they “can go back to enjoying what they liked about social media that’s not underpinned by ravenous ad businesses,” said Wired.
These competing microblogging sites have struggled to catch up to Elon Musk’s market behemoth
