> They don’t seem to offer anything new
Bluesky actually does offer some neat features. Starter Packs is such a brilliant feature for onboarding people into specific niches - it's a wonder why it took so long for someone to do this.
'Labellers' is a neat approach to moderation - you can subscribe to a labeller, and it marks accounts according to whatever criteria and then you can chose how you want that to shape your experience - block those posts/accounts outright, hide them behind a disclaimer, or just put a little badge on them. I subscribed to one which marks public figures with which private school they went to which is funny.
Custom algorithms is also another really neat improvement to the overall experience. On my homepage I pinned a "Quiet Posters" feed that surfaces posts from lower-volume people I follow that I might have otherwise missed. This is necessarily a feature of the AT Protocol's open network that really needs the firehose to function.
But the biggest 'new feature' (for now) is that it's non-commercial so Bluesky's incentives are not directly opposed to it's users. Even pre-Musk, Twitter's business goals worked against it's users, driving engagement at all costs to pump up ad views and revenue. A company that doesn't make money from page views, and which is based on an open network, will have more going for it to creative a positive environment for all. It remains to be seen how sustainable this is, which Bluesky taking investment, and whether at open AT Protocol can be an escape valve for Bluesky making the product worse.