Twitter's new rivals suffer similar problems: Threads to use rate limits due to spam and Bluesky missed racist slurs

• Elon Musk has been heavily criticized for many of his Twitter decisions. 
• Some new Twitter rivals are experiencing similar problems now. 
• Meta's Threads will use rate limits to tackle an increase in spam.

Elon Musk has been heavily criticized for many of his Twitter decisions, especially a lack of moderation on the service and his recent decision to limit how many tweets users see to tackle spam. 

Now, two of the most-promising new Twitter rivals are experiencing similar issues. 

"Spam attacks have picked up so we're going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives). If you get caught up those protections let us know," Adam Mosseri, a Meta executive who runs the new Threads service, wrote in a post on Monday. 

I had to triple-check that this post wasn't fake. But it's real. And it's strangely familiar. 

In early July, Musk announced temporary tweet-viewing rate limits restricting how many posts un-verified Twitter users can see, blaming "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation" for the limited functionality. 

Twitter users howled their disapproval and many commentators said the spam reasoning was bogus. However, it now seems like Meta, the most powerful social media company in the world, is suffering from the same spam problem — and is taking a similar approach to fix it. 

"I seem to waste half my time blocking bots pushing gambling and crypto sites," one Threads user posted, following Mosseri's update. "Same here. It's been pretty relentless today," another Threads user commented. 

Bluesky is the other hot alternative to Twitter. Bluesky has been a haven for users who were particularly worried about less moderation on Twitter and the return of extreme and potentially racist posts. 

However, Bluesky is having trouble policing its own site, according to several news reports. On Sunday, Mashable reported that Bluesky users protested after several accounts used racial slurs in their usernames because the platform failed to block the ability for users to register such names. 

Bluesky told Mashable that it initially got complaints about one account on Wednesday and removed it within 40 minutes. The team also said it patched the code that allowed these handles to be created within that timeframe as well. It's also investing in trust and safety.