Why BlueSky is better than Twitter

Brief stats

I've started writing this post a couple of weeks ago, and it's simply hard to keep up with all the news that appears daily about BlueSky's growth.

Here is the screenshot I took initially.

According to Google Trends, BlueSky reached a peak in October, surpassing both Twitter and Threads. I'm not sure why it happened, but Elon's announcement of yet another X feature — that X will allow people you've blocked to see your posts — probably served as the catalyst.

In any case, what's important is that by November 15, 2024, we can definitely observe an interesting situation. Many tech influencers, famous Twitter users, and well-known individuals worldwide began migrating to BlueSky at that time.

Some announced that they left Twitter, while others deleted all their tweets and locked their accounts, or even completely deleted them

Today I checked Google trends for X and BlueSky for tha past 90 days in the US.

With more than 500K+ searches over the last 7 days, BlueSky is ranked in the top 8 in the US.

News like this keeps coming in. For instance, a recent post by John Burn-Murdoch, a columnist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times, demonstrates that as BlueSky's user base grew, the number of Twitter/X account deactivations also increased concurrently.

And now we're witnessing how it becomes #1 app in Apple app store (by November 17, 2024). Images are taken from Jane's post.

And just before publishing this article, yet another post, now from the official BlueSky account, saying that it crossed 18M+ users.

In this article, I'll finally do what I planned to do for quite some time — roast Twitter UI and compare it to the BlueSky experience.

Twitter from usability point of view

It's almost impossible to have enough patience to go over each nook and cranny of Twitter UI, so I'll put it bluntly. Here is the start screen.

Let's count how many useful links we have in the navigation, including items under the "more" menu:

Now, here is the menu of SalesForce CRM.

I believe you can see what I'm driving at. The number of links is comparable to that of a CRM. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, a social network can indeed offer a wide range of features. However, does Twitter:

1. Show us necessary features?
2. Organizes the navigation in a reasonable way?
3. Uses proper icons, spacing, and words?

As I said, I'm looking from the user point of view. Whether the business benefits from it or not doesn't matter to me. Of course, every UX designer should take into account business goals, and in an ideal world, both sides (business and users) should be happy.

But here I'm comparing two platforms to choose which one offers a better user experience. Twitter users the patterns that are non-conventional, let alone the number of bugs and bots.

Anyway, let's simply state what is absolutely wrong in my not-so-humble opinion.

What's wrong with Twitter UI?

I logged in and looked at the menu.

What is Grok?

Some kind of AI assistant? With the same success, you can call the home page "Korg." Why not?

Okay, if I understand correctly, this assistant should make tweeting easier. Instead, I have to stop writing my tweets and switch to Grok. It's highly likely I'll lose what I've already written. You know, in order to check my grammar or think about some words, I open a new tab and ask ChatGPT instead.

The problem is that it doesn't help me in any way when writing my posts, while every scheduling tool does that. Look at how TypeFully helps with AI.

No, it's not an ad, and TypeFully doesn't support BlueSky yet, but I already mentioned their UI solutions on Smashing Magazine. For example, how they use inline guards.

Premium

The amount and limitations and controversy regarding Twitter's tariff plans are truly outrageous. I don't remember all the logic that lies behind different plans, and there is no surprise why people constantly ask whether they should buy Premium or maybe Premium+?

I'm not even sure if users who have just signed up can read more than 500 or so tweets. How do you feel about this limitation on reading for the free plan? It's ironic that I'm not fact-checking this, as it could have undergone numerous changes already.

But back to the UI. Where would you usually expect to see information about your subscription? Right in the middle of navigation?! Not in account settings, not in the top-right corner, but simply right in the middle?

Communities

Let's see what we have here.

Although I could assume the first three are my communities, it wouldn't hurt to state this explicitly. Additionally, the page has a feed of posts from these communities. But at the same time, Twitter has lists, where you can add members and see their posts. What's the exact difference between those feeds?

While communities have richer functionality, it's still not enough. Have you ever heard that someone recommended Twitter (not Circle, Discord, or anything else) to create a community?

BlueSky also offers two similar features: lists and feeds. But that's different. Custom feeds typically lack any complicated algorithm (at least I think so). There are plenty of feeds, and you can add any of them. For instance, the " Popular with friends" feed combines popular content from accounts you follow with content that your followers find appealing.

Lists are just lists; you can add members to them.

Okay, let's see how well my community is doing. So we open the homepage of a community and—wait a second. Where are the members? Any information? Anything a community should have? Let's accidentally scroll up.

Ah, here it is. Now, look at the red area I highlighted. I bet you won't guess what each icon means and does.

1. The sparkle icon is (of course...) not related to AI.
2. The upload (or download, or export) will not prompt you with anything like that.
3. Turning on notifications will trigger a modal that will ask you a few questions. You cannot opt to receive notifications when someone posts. Maybe it's okay, since you'll get a lot of notifications, but I have a strange feeling that some communities are made for this. For instance, I receive notifications when someone sends a message in Telegram chat groups. I can turn it off, but it's up to me.

And finally, the "Joined" button. I'm going to take a photo of how I see it, right in my room.

What will happen if I flick the switch on? Right, my cat will ask me to feed her; I'll be right back.

Okay, I understand; sometimes people use this trick: when you hover over the button, or, for example, a table row, a delete button appears. But for the community home page?!

Verified Orgs

I'll go over the icon choices later. But what are verified orgs? A list of organizations that are verified on Twitter, right?

Like, those special organizations that are verified, and I can check them. BBC, CNN, Apple, whichever. Let's subscribe to cool guys then!

Ah, they ask for money. I should have guessed. Again, I'll get increased reach and four options. Let alone that the Premium that we already had.

In the middle of the menu, while lists, bookmarks, and spaces are hidden under the more icon.

Soon it will be like this:

Starter Packs!

Here is when things become different. Both Twitter and BlueSky have lists. On Twitter, lists are hidden under the "more" icon, even though it's more important than "Verified Orgs," in my opinion. But you can follow the list, not the followers, unless you do it manually (or I don't know how to follow them all).

The BlueSky team came up with a brilliant idea—starter packs. They function as a list of recommended followers for both new and existing users. With one click, you can follow them all, or you can choose exactly whom to follow.

Imagine you sign up for a new social network and see a familiar face who created a curated list of developers. It's super tempting to follow them all and have a lovely feed to read. Plus, the design of the starter packs is right spot on. It shows avatars of people you could already know. It just

This is how the starter pack page looks. It's not mandatory to follow everyone; it's up to you to choose who to follow.

What we had on Twitter for ages? When someone wants to share a list of accounts, they just tag all of them, either in one post or in a thread. The post will eventually go down in the timeline, and that's it (unless you bookmarked or pinned it).

But gosh, just compare these two approaches:

There are so many sections, pages, and modals that it may end up being a book of wrong usability decisions.

While X is trying to be "the everything app" it becomes "the nothing app".

It's challenging to quickly develop a quality job board, streaming, posting, and community app while simultaneously laying off a significant number of engineers.

Does anyone use Twitter for looking for jobs? I mean, in the jobs page. Or if I ask you, what platform would you recommend to me for making a community, will Twitter be your first choice? Will you at least think of it? While it has a job board and communities.

Back to UI

My favorite game is to try to guess the meanings of icons without labels. Yes, context matters. Yes, you can get used to them. But why not choose icons that suit better?

Yes, it might be hard to find a suitable icon for some menu items, but this sometimes happens because the whole menu is a total mess.

Anyway, here are three pictures. The first one without labels. The second one is what I would think these icons mean. The third one is hidden. Click the button to reveal the answer.

Reveal Answer

Let's talk about BlueSky

I wouldn't say that it's a perfect application that doesn't have any flaws. Although it is still in its early stages, I find it much more enjoyable to use.

One of the reasons is that the quality of the feed is better since many tech experts (I really mean it) migrated to BlueSky.

But let's take a look at its UI, since even though it's better than Twitter''s', it yet has some room to improve.

Home page

The home page resembles Twitter very much. The key difference is that it looks pretty clean. There aren't many links, subscriptions (premium, premium+, verified orgs, and so on), or other distracting elements.

What I want to draw your attention to is that Twitter is a mess. It's a mess of colors, icons, and information architecture. Look at this post, which compares the search input on two different platforms, to understand what I mean.

Navigation

The navigation definitely seems way cleaner and does not contain a lot of weird things. The only thing that is somewhat controversial is the feeds icon. To me, it seems like it's a hashtag. But it's not that easy to find a proper icon... Probably it should be something related to a list or a timeline, not sure.

New post

While at first glance these two forms look similar, the devil is in the details.

Here is the Twitter form.

And the BlueSky form.

In my opinion, both forms violate the general rule of element placement. A very general, typical modal with all the buttons usually looks like this.

The thing is, there is the Jakob's law, whhich states that:

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

So most of the time a modal has

1. A title in the header at the left-top corner
2. The close icon is located in the right-top corner
3. The CTA button or several buttons are located in the bottom-right corner

While for each rule there is an exception, I still believe that both Twitter and BlueSky could make the modals more traditional-styled. Especially Twitter, since it has a lot of other issues (e.g. showing me a disabled location icon, without any hint why it's disabled, even on hover).

For some reason both social networks laced the close icon to the left-top corner and there is no title or the modal. The CTA buttons placement is also different (on BlueSky).

But it seems to me that it becomes an acceptable solution, since it looks like people use it without any complains (until you get to the scheduling form on Twitter 😅).

But look at how BlueSky treat their UI compared to Twitter.

This is what happens when you select who can interact with your post. Let's call things by their proper names.

On the left side we can see a messy UI, on the right side we can see a clean UI.

Bonus feature that I adore about BlueSky

Instead of thinking about username, you can use your use your own domain as a handle! Literally, it means that everyone who sees the link to your profile, who sees your avatar in a feed, and in many other places, can understand that your handle is your site.

My thoughts about social networks

1. X becomes TikTok.
2. Threads works in a strange way, huge affected by algorithm. Some posts get 0 likes, some 500 likes, and both brings you zero followers - what's going on here?
3. LinkedIn - overloaded with unnecessary things, but more or less decent to be here