author_name|Karissa Bell

Bluesky is bigger than ever. But as the upstart social media service surges, the platform is facing some growing pains.

Meta’s Threads is pushing out another test that could address a major long-running complaint about the service. The company is experimenting with allowing users to set the non-algorithmic “following” feed as the default, Mark Zuckerberg shared in a post.

Remember in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when live audio was suddenly everywhere? The trend was made popular by the briefly viral phenomenon Clubhouse before seemingly every other online platform copied the feature for themselves.

Threads is making more changes to address long-running complaints from users. This time, the company is testing out improvements to its search and trending topics feature in updates that Adam Mosseri described as “long-overdue improvements.”

Meta is making progress in its fight against pig butchering scams. In an update, the company said it has taken down more than 2 million accounts associated with such scams this year and that its effort to work with other companies to take down fraudsters has had some success.

As the competition between Bluesky and Threads heats up, Meta is adding a new feature to Threads that will likely look familiar to Bluesky users: custom feeds. The Meta-owned service is starting to test a feature that allows users to pin topic-based feeds to the home screen of the app.

Snapchat is adding new location tracking abilities to its parental control features. The changes will give parents new visibility into their children’s Snap Map settings and allow them to keep tabs on their whereabouts.

Bluesky may still be the underdog in the race for alternatives to X, but the once Twitter-affiliated service is gaining momentum. The app just passed the 15 million user mark after adding more than a million new users over the last week, the company said in an update.

Threads could start getting ads much sooner than Meta has let on. The company is now planning to bring ads to its newest app “early next year” with the first ads arriving in January of 2025, according to a new report in The Information.

President-elect Donald Trump has named Elon Musk as the leader of a new “Department of Government Efficiency," that will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” The Tesla CEO and owner of X will spearhead the effort along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump