Key Points
- Bluesky now supports 40 million user accounts, the company said on Friday.
- The platform, an alternative to X/Twitter, has been accused of stoking confirmation bias and failing to address problematic behavior.
- Bluesky is testing a “dislike” function that might help, or exacerbate, that problem.
Bluesky, the social media platform popular with academics, journalists and American progressives, has reached a new milestone: 40 million user accounts.
The company announced the news on Friday by posting a screenshot to its official account, with emojis representing the numbers “4” and “0.”
The service is the most-popular to run on the AT protocol, a decentralized platform similar to Mastodon. Bluesky allows users to post short-form, text-based messages along with animated images and short videos, and operates similar to X.com, the social media service formerly known as Twitter.
Executives at Bluesky didn’t say how many of its 40 million user accounts are connected to actively-engaged people on the platform. Typically, Bluesky experiences a wave of new account sign-ups during politically-charged events, such as the November election, or when X.com changes its policies and rules in a way that aggravates users of that service. Less clear is how many of those users stick around long after they sign up.
In recent weeks, accounts connected to the federal agencies and members of the Trump administration began appearing on Bluesky, with executives promptly affixing a blue “verified” badges to those profiles.
Bluesky markets itself as an open-source alternative to X.com and other platforms, allowing anyone to see just about anything, including how accounts interact with each other.
The official accounts for Vice President J.D. Vance, the White House, the U.S. Department of Defense (referred to by the Trump administration as the Department of War) and the U.S. State Department are among the most-blocked profiles by other Bluesky users, according to a tool that tracks account activity.
The service does not have “private” posts, meaning anything published by a user is instantly — and, for the most part, permanently — viewable by everyone on the platform.
Throughout its history, Bluesky and its users have been accused of catering to specific political and social views, despite executives promoting it as a haven of free speech and expression. Executives have also been accused of failing to promptly remove user accounts of people who violate its rules, according to Engadget, and the company has done little to promote respectable discourse.
That appears to be changing, according to reports: In the coming weeks, Bluesky will roll out a “dislike” feature that will allow users to attach social sentiment to the posts they see in their feed. Engadget said that feature could work one of two ways — it might allow people to gain greater control over the content that appears in their feed, but it might also lock users into a “filter bubble,” where their confirmation bias is exacerbated.
