Social media start-up Bluesky is exploding as academics, journalist, and left-leaning politicians abandon Elon Musk’s X in search of bluer skies. Now, the platform has surpassed Meta’s Threads in user numbers, yet Threads still leads in app usage.
According to data from Similarweb, app and website usage of Bluesky in the United States rose more than 500 percent following President-elect Donald Trump’s election win, raking in 3.5 million daily users. The platform still only has around 21.5 million users as of Nov. 22.
“We’ve been growing by about a million users a day for several days,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told NPR on Monday. “It’s proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they’ll have a better time.”
The app, created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, debuted in 2019 as a desktop and app-based social network that operates similarly to X. Users can post text, videos and photos, reply to one another and share other users’ posts. The platform is now led by digital rights activist and software engineer Graber.
Aside from the growing discontent among X users with Musk, Bluesky’s expansion has come partly from its “starter pack” feature that allows users to follow curated groups of accounts with the click of a button.
This growth, however, has faltered due to repeated outages and glitches and concerns over its future success as a working business model.
Still, prior to Nov. 5, Threads had five times more daily U.S. users than Bluesky. Now, the Meta run platform is only 1.5 times larger than its much smaller rival.
Some have attributed the closing margin to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to de-prioritize political content across its apps, including Facebook and Instagram.
By contrast, Musk has curtailed content moderation on X since taking over the platform, leading to concerns about the spread of disinformation.
The Tesla executive’s embrace of deregulation, his affiliation with Trump, and promotion of fringe theories prompted a first wave of user departures after the app was suspended in Brazil in September.
The temporary ban coincided with Bluesky picking up 3 million new users that week. The X alternative added another 1.2 million users in the two days after Musk announced his app would allow blocked users to view posts by those who had blocked them.
Since Trump’s election victory, however, several prominent businesses, celebrities, and journalists have publicly and officially left X, including Target, The Guardian, journalist Don Lemon, actor Bradley Whitford, and singer Barbra Streisand.
