Microblogging hasn’t disappeared, but it has begun to fracture over the past few years.
The short-form, real-time social space once dominated by the platform formerly (and, let's face it, presently) known as Twitter has become more democratic and divergent, with new platforms appearing shaped by very different ideas about governance, moderation, and ownership.
For brands and communication teams, that fragmentation is no longer theoretical, and has become an operational concern.
At Facelift, our responsibility is not to bet on a single network, but to give customers stable, flexible ways to engage wherever their audiences actually are. That responsibility is what’s driving increased investment in Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.
The new direction we're taking is a direct response to clear signals from customers, regulators, and the platforms themselves.
One of the clearest signals we track is usage.
Since 2021, publishing volume on X across Facelift customers has declined by more than 70 percent, even as the total number of connected social accounts has grown. As of early 2026, X represents just over one percent of all publishing activity in Facelift, with fewer than one in eight customers actively connected to the platform.
That shift didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen for a single reason.
Teams cite audience migration, moderation uncertainty, internal brand-safety standards, and changing content performance.
In parallel, public reporting in the European Union shows declining reach for X across multiple member states, reinforcing the pattern we see inside our own product. When customer behavior and public data move in the same direction, it’s a signal worth taking seriously.
What’s striking about Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads is that they are not interchangeable replacements. Each reflects a different answer to the same core question: how should large-scale public conversation be governed?
Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which separates identity, hosting, and moderation into distinct layers. That architecture allows communities and organizations to apply moderation services and content filters that match their own standards, without relying on a single global rule set. For brands, this matters because it reduces exposure to sudden policy shifts while preserving reach. It also lowers dependency on a single corporate owner making unilateral decisions about visibility and enforcement.
Mastodon takes a more explicitly federated approach. Built on ActivityPub, it allows anyone to host an instance with its own rules, moderation practices, and legal posture, while remaining interoperable with the wider Fediverse. This model has made Mastodon particularly attractive to European organizations, public institutions, and NGOs that prioritize regulatory alignment and local control. For enterprises, Mastodon’s openness and portability reduce platform lock-in and make long-term planning easier.
Threads occupies a very different position. It is part of Meta’s ecosystem, tightly integrated with Instagram, and designed for scale from day one. Threads has already surpassed hundreds of millions of monthly active users and continues to grow rapidly. At the same time, Meta has begun rolling out ActivityPub interoperability, allowing Threads content to interact with parts of the Fediverse, a controversial move given that one of the major drivers of users moving to Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms was a desire to get away from mainstream corporate X and Meta products. Despite that, the combination of scale and emerging openness makes Threads a pragmatic option for teams that want reach without abandoning interoperability entirely.
For social teams, the biggest operational risk today is unpredictability.
Repeated changes to platform rules, moderation enforcement, and developer access - such as changes to API access or fees - make it difficult to plan campaigns, reporting, and approvals over meaningful time horizons. Even when changes are defensible in isolation, the cumulative effect is churn. Teams are forced to adapt reactively.
This is where alternatives are gaining ground.
Bluesky’s public protocols, Mastodon’s open-source foundation, and Threads’ integration with a mature advertising and analytics ecosystem all offer different forms of predictability. None of them are perfect, but each provides clearer expectations than an environment where terms and enforcement can shift abruptly.
From a product perspective, this predictability matters because customers build workflows around it. Calendars, approval chains, compliance reviews, and reporting processes all depend on consistency.
It’s important to be explicit about what this does and does not mean.
Facelift is not deprecating access to X at this time. Customers who rely on it can continue to do so, and nothing about existing connections has changed.
At the same time, we believe it’s responsible for us to encourage diversification and not to turn a blind eye to the harm caused by platforms when it occurs.
Teams that rely heavily on a single platform for real-time communication are more exposed than they realize, and we advise diversification now more than ever - and we're happy to facilitate it!
Establishing a presence on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads now allows organizations to experiment, build audiences, and refine formats before urgency sets in.
Our role is to make that experimentation easy. That’s why we support these platforms today and will continue to invest in them moving forward as more enterprises and their followers adopt them.
Microblogging is not likely to ever revert to a single center of gravity the way it did historically with Twitter. The future is plural, federated, and more complex than what came before, and we invite that change, and our users to explore it.
That complexity is a reflection of competing values around speech, safety, ownership, and accountability. For brands and public organizations, we want to be there to support flexibility rather than lock-in via not just our own tools, but the composable marketing ecosystem of Entirely.
With stronger support for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, we’re aligning with where our users and their audiences are already moving, and where governance models offer greater transparency and resilience.
We’ll continue to evaluate all platforms we support, keep customers informed of any changes to the platforms we offer, and prioritize stability, trust, and choice as these shifts occur.