BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn't won by having a better product, it's won by convincing people they should buy your product.
Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that's just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn't have like a 90% miss rate.
Your ability to participate in political organization and not immediately be killed or thrown in jail depends on the people who are in power. The United States isn't immune to regressing to that society, and it's very clear the Republicans are doing what they can to move in that direction.
Voting for the Democrats and doing nothing else is far from ideal and won't fix the institutional problems, but it will help prevent new major problems, like mass murder for criticizing the government, from popping up.
Voting for the Democrats so you can continue activism is step one, and is an important step. It's also a trivially easy step with no downside. It's just not the only step.
This article presumably intentionally totally fails to address the fact that you could prevent this by stopping further climate change. It takes continued global warming as a foregone conclusion and is just like, "Welp, how can we deal with the impending hellscape the wealthy and powerful are creating?"
Boy, I'm not a lawyer, but that sure feels like being forced to incriminate yourself.