Most outlets remain absent from the growing social media app
A SPECIAL FEATURE
by Brian Allen
You don’t have to do much heavy lifting to find Atlanta media on the most heavily used social apps like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Most local media and media professionals are on and actively using these top social media sites.
But you won’t find very many of Atlanta’s radio and TV stations on the newest social media app on the block, Bluesky. Although a few have set up a presence there, most others have not posted any content on their accounts or are not there at all.
To be fair, Bluesky, which launched to the general public on February 6, 2024 after a stint as an “invitation-only” app, is still growing beyond the experimental phase. According to bskycheck.com, the app currently has 43,708,559 users as of this post. It has added nearly 7 thousand users since 11 am today.
By contrast, X has 557 million users worldwide, Facebook has over 3 billion globally, as does Instagram. TikTok has close to 2 billion. Those numbers tell most of the story as to why local media isn’t flocking to Bluesky. Even Threads (a similar app to X and Bluesky) has more than 400 million active users.
Despite Bluesky’s slow growth of its user base, a few local media outlets have been actively using the app, becoming the proverbial canaries in a coal mine for local media’s use of the app.
Among local TV stations with news operations, three stations have been actively using Bluesky: WAGA Fox 5 (236 followers, 5k posts), Atlanta News First (1.4k followers, 7.3k posts), and CBS Atlanta (68 followers, 21 posts). All three stations have been regularly and recently posting news content on their accounts. WSB-TV and WXIA-TV do not have a presence on the app.
As for Atlanta’s radio stations, there’s barely any local radio presence on Bluesky. Georgia State University’s Album 88 posted 25 times and has 92 followers. WABE Radio has 1.6K followers, but has yet to post any content. 105.5 “The King” only posted twice, and not since 2024.
Many stations, like WSB (the news/talk station, although talk host Mark Arum posts regularly), Star 94, V-103, and 929 The Game are on the app, but have not posted yet. Others, like 99X, 949 The Bull, Power 105.3, Kiss 104.1, 96.1 The Beat, The Fan, Q99.7, and WCLK don’t have an account on Bluesky at all, although some stations (like WCLK) get a lot of mentions on individual user accounts.
Atlanta’s largest newspaper, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has 5.8k followers and 3.6k posts. Rough Draft is also a regular poster, with 1.3k followers and 5k posts to date. Both have recently posted on their accounts.
Georgia Public Broadcasting, the state’s largest public broadcaster, has 66 followers on its Bluesky account and has posted nine times since it launched last February.
It should be noted that one of the biggest sources of media content, Atlanta’s pro sports scene, has little if any official presence on Bluesky. The Atlanta Falcons (thanks to NFL rules) have no official presence on the app. The Hawks and Braves are represented by mirror sites (that distribute respective X account content to Bluesky users) but don’t have official accounts. Atlanta United isn’t officially on the app. The Atlanta Dream does have an official presence on Bluesky, but they have not yet posted to their 674 followers.
The Local college sports teams are somewhat a different story. The Georgia Bulldogs are on Bluesky, but the football team hasn’t posted this past season (as has Georgia State Athletics). Georgia Tech last posted 7 months ago.
The media’s avoidance of Bluesky up to this point is due to more than just its smaller user base in contrast to its larger social media peers. The app currently offers few monetization opportunities (like ad revenue sharing, with X, Meta, and YouTube notoriously do) to entice users to sign up and actively use the app. It has also been slow to upgrade its offerings to creators, although this has been changing very recently.
It doesn’t help that Bluesky was hit by a sophisticated denial of service attack earlier this month, which caused a widespread outage of the site.
Then there are the ties that some brands and organizations have with the Elon Musk-owned X, which leads potential brands to avoid X competitors like Bluesky.
Bluesky may have its technical and content-fostering issues, but many who are on it enjoy the quality and tone of the conversations on the app. The lack of bots and negative interactions that have festered on other apps for years is appealing to Bluesky’s users.
“A number of people who were once prolific posters on X say they now prefer Bluesky, in part because they trust that most users are real and that interactions feel more authentic,” noted a recent Fast Company article, noting how Bluesky is starting to experience the same problems that bedeviled X, Facebook, and other social media sites.
The article adds that although Bluesky is known for lacking the political conflict element that drives social media conversation today, the presence of real people on the app is why those who are on it like it.
“The biggest difference is that I can say for certain that the majority of people responding are… actual people?” says Ed Zitron, a writer and podcaster with 175 thousand followers, who FC interviewed about his experience on the app. “This wasn’t always novel.”
But for it to be a stronger competitor to its social media peers, Bluesky needs to offer more than just a pleasant place to vent. Threads and X, for example, offer the ability to edit posts. Bluesky offers a limited number of characters on its posts, whereas X and Threads offer a much larger character limit. Not having these features makes the site less attractive to journalists and creators.
Recently, Bluesky offered an update that would be most pleasing to creators: a doubling of the maximum file size to 2 MB and an updated photo resolution limit to 4000×40000. Also, a photo carousel was added for users to show off more of their photos, which would be a boon to journalists and photo-intensive accounts.
The one thing Bluesky has going for it that other sites don’t have: the lack of a predetermined algorithm controlling what users see. This has long been a complaint by users of Meta products (Facebook, Threads, Instagram) and X, but so far, this has not been a deterrent to media’s use of these sites, nor has it been an effective lure to Bluesky.
But Bluesky brass is interested in adding more new features to grow its user base further. If they put a reasonable growth and content plan into action, and their user base builds, local media may yet add Bluesky to their social media arsenal.
Image credit: Bluesky