Over the past two weeks, a relatively new social media platform called Bluesky has become the service of choice for disgruntled users of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, following the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
The service has exploded in popularity, growing from around 6 million registered users last month to more than 21 million accounts as of mid-Sunday. The momentum is not slowing down: Staffers at the startup social media platform have been working around-the-clock to keep the website online, troubleshooting bugs and spinning up new servers in an effort to accommodate all that growth.
The reason for the defection boils down to a few things: X (Twitter) has become increasingly user-unfriendly over the past two years, ever since technology mogul Elon Musk acquired the company. The platform’s ever-shifting policies (most of which are urged by Musk himself), its decision to banish journalists and label news organizations as “state sponsored,” and its recent shift to remove a critical “blocking” feature have upset many of its most-prominent users and left them looking for a viable alternative.
It isn’t just X users who are defecting, though: Users of Meta Platform’s Threads are also leaving that platform for bluer skies. According to data from online measurement firm SimilarWeb, the number of daily active users on Threads since the 2024 presidential election has dipped from its peak of just over one million. Bluesky, meanwhile, has nearly 3 million daily active users.
While Bluesky has built its audience and features from the ground up, Threads had a major advantage from the start: It is co-owned with Facebook and Instagram, two of the most-popular social media platforms in the world, and it leveraged that synergy to promote Threads as a viable alternative to X.
Threads quickly found favor with brands who were looking for additional places to reach Facebook and Instagram users, but it lacked a number of things from the start that kept it from really going mainstream, including the ability to access the platform from a web browser.
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Bluesky has more features today than it did from the start — users can now upload 60-second video clips and direct message their followers — and it still lacks a few functions that are found on other platforms. But users appear to be more-forgiving of Bluesky because they have more control over what appears on their feeds and who can interact with them at any given time.
Bluesky has a few other things going for it, too: The platform is not owned by a recognizable tech mogul who has grown cozy with politicians (Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook, and continues to serve as the CEO of Meta Platforms). It doesn’t employ a staff of thousands of people, which means there are fewer hurdles to develop and launch new features. And the platform rewards users who make positive contributions with attention — whether they’re publishing good content that resonates with Bluesky’s audience, or developing their own features like news feeds and directories that help users make the most of the service.
That isn’t to say Bluesky is perfect — the granular level of control over one’s feed can lead to a situation where users close themselves off to new ideas and challenging perspectives, which can result in the same type of confirmation bias that cable news outlets and news websites serve up on a regular basis. (In its early days, the overwhelming majority of active users with large amounts of followers were publishing posts, or “skeets,” that found favor with progressives, something that has only accelerated over the past two weeks).
But the benefits of a platform that gives people the ability to hard block abusive trolls might be better than the risk of ideological silos. And that serves as an example of Bluesky’s biggest strength: It is empowering to feel like you, rather than an algorithm, is in control of the social experience. By putting the user in the driver’s seat, Bluesky has quickly become a platform that people trust with their information, their content and their connections.
The question now is, how does Bluesky make it over the long term? The company behind the service launched with a financial investment from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (who has since removed himself from the company — TechDirt publisher Mike Masnick succeeded him on Bluesky’s board), and later raised $23 million in two venture rounds from private investors, according to the New York Times.
For a growing website, $23 million isn’t really a lot of money, especially in Silicon Valley. Employees and electricity don’t come cheap, and Bluesky will have to quickly figure out how it will cover the bills if it wants to keep things going.
