End-of-the-year Social Update: 2024 edition
What a year 2024 has been! Social media has made some interesting transitions this year and since we’ve last updated. We think it’s time to get the new scoop!
Let’s start with threads, shall we? The new update users and Threads admins are excited about is removing the ‘follow from Instagram’ feature. It used to be set up where everyone you followed from Instagram would transfer over to Threads when you started your account. Admins have actually done research and realized that those who don’t have that feature are more likely to use Threads – makes sense! Maybe we don’t want to follow all our family members and random people we’ve met over the years on a new app… *shrug*.
Speaking of new apps – Bluesky is taking the social media world by storm with a whopping 20 million users as of November 2024. What is Bluesky you ask? Well, Jack Dorsey created it in 2019 to co-inside with Twitter (eventually), if that answers anything. According to TechCrunch, “At the time, he said Twitter would be funding a “small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers,” charged with building a decentralized standard for social media, with the original goal that Twitter would adopt this standard itself.” Well, now that Twitter is X and is now owned by Elon Musk as of two years ago, that’s out the window. People are jumping ship from X with all their new updates, rule changes, etc. and Bluesky is almost a carbon copy of what it used to be. Hello, nostalgia? Learn how to use it here.
When it comes to nostalgia of social media, what do you miss most? How about algorithms that show you the user’s posts you ACTUALLY want to see? Well, we might just get that back. “Instagram is testing a new feature that will let users completely refresh the content that’s recommended to them on the platform,” reported by The Verge. It’s not completely reverting back to what we have seen in the past, but it gives every user the opportunity to re-personalize their feed again.
Last but certainly not least, the TikTok ban is still up in the air. January 2025 will be very telling for the app in the United States, considering there has been no movement of the parent company ByteDance being sold by its Chinese ownership. Read more on that from our previous blog.
That’s all from us. See ya next year?