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A new player is taking over social media. In less than a year, decentralized social platform Bluesky has gone from an unknown entity to one of the hottest apps in the world — reaching 20 million new sign-ups in November 2024 and the #1 spot on the App Store in the U.S.
Bluesky’s early momentum, particularly following the result of the U.S. Presidential Election, suggests the startup is going to be stepping on Twitter/X’s toes to try and become the internet’s new online town square.
But what is it that’s making users like Mark Hamill, Barbara Streisand, Ben Stiller, and Stephen King leave Twitter and join Bluesky? Let’s dive in.
Key Takeaways
- Bluesky is a decentralized social media platform aiming to take on X.
- The social platform has acquired 20 million new sign-ups in 9 months and currently sat at #1 on the Apple App Store in November 2024.
- Many X users transitioned to Bluesky following the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election as a protest to Elon Musk’s association with the Trump campaign.
- The surge in sign-ups means Bluesky joins X, Mastodon, and Threads as one of the biggest social platforms in the world.
- While X does have a legitimate challenger, there’s still a long way to go before Bluesky could even attempt to take the tech giant’s position as a market leader.
Bluesky is a social media platform that started off as a Twitter project overseen by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, before becoming a standalone company headed by software engineer Jay Graber as CEO in 2022.
The service officially launched to the public in February 2024.
The free platform offers a similar user experience to the old Twitter user interface, giving users the opportunity to create a handle to publish text posts, images, and videos.
They can also interact with other users’ posts via actions, including reposts, replies, quotes, and likes.
One of the key differentiators is Bluesky’s use of the AT protocol, an open, decentralized network for building social applications.
This gives users significantly more transparency over how the service is developed and why certain content is being displayed to the user.
X has 550 million monthly active users, while Threads have 275 million monthly active users — and Threads sometimes adds 15 million users a month. There is a long road ahead for Bluesky to catch up, with 20 million users, but it is not a bad start.
The Success of Bluesky
While Bluesky has not yet reached the level of X or Threads, it is one of the fast-growing social networks.
Part of the reason for this fast growth is that many people are disillusioned with the direction of social platforms like X,and more general issues over toxicity.
Although many users support the laissez-faire approach to content moderation that Elon Musk has taken, there are also many who see Twitter as a cause of misinformation. Musk’s alignment with Donald Trump and regular right-wing posts have also lost the platform fans.
Much of Bluesky’s current momentum arrives from the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election, with many users, journalists, celebrities, and activists planning to boycott X in response to Musk’s close connections to the Trump campaign and his decision to lift Trump’s ban on the platform.
For example, data collected by Similarweb finds that since the election, usage of the Bluesky app is more than 500% higher in the U.S. and 350% higher in the UK.
Most notably, Similarweb notes that the day after the election, website traffic and app usage spiked to Bluesky as journalists and opinion leaders and their followers decided to stop using X or seek alternatives.
It is also worth noting that many users may be opting to change platforms because they are dissatisfied with the user experience on X, or more controversial decisions made by Musk, including using posts to train Grok and letting blocked users see the posts of a user that’s blocked them.
Damian Rollin, director of market insights at SOCi, told Techopedia:
“The political division that has spurred the recent growth of Bluesky’s user base is perhaps nothing to celebrate, but the concept of a decentralized social network, providing greater control to user communities and relying less on the monetization of user engagement, is a healthy move that hearkens back to the early, more egalitarian days of the internet.
“So, the time is right for the disruption of incumbent technologies with new ideas. Consider that Google’s search engine is 26 years old, Facebook’s social platform just turned 20, and Twitter debuted a full 18 years ago in 2006.
“Though these platforms have established themselves as the norm in their respective fields, they’ve also left many users frustrated with their perceived biases and limitations.”
Why Twitter Should Be Concerned
At this stage, X is the bigger platform but it’s also the most polarizing. Some people love the free speech-centric approach of X, and many don’t.
Bluesky has the advantage over X in the fact that it offers something different (yet harkening back to a pre-Musk Twitter), at a time when many users are looking for a fresh experience that has not been hammered by Twitter’s algorithm into something resembling political warfare.
Challenges Bluesky Will Face on the Road Ahead
It is not all going to be plain sailing for Bluesky. When you’re the new kid on the block, people can overlook some of your app and leadership shortcomings, but the bigger your platform gets, the more user expectations are going to increase.
After all, it’s one thing to attract disgruntled users from bigger platforms — it’s another thing to offer a user experience that keeps them coming back long-term.
If Bluesky’s moderation policy doesn’t live up to expectations and fails to limit toxicity (a tall task on the internet), then users can easily jump ship again.
There has been plenty of criticism over the platform for having a content moderation policy that silences conservative voices. However true this claim is, having another politicized big tech platform doesn’t seem like the answer.
CEO Jay Graber will also come under increasing pressure to make the right decisions. We’ve already seen some criticism —this week, she was seemingly unaware of the age limit of the platform, stating you need to be 18 to use the service when users as young as 13 can sign up.
The Bottom Line
Bluesky has stolen the show as the fastest-growing social media network in the world right now.
While it’s unlikely to unseat X overnight, it puts forward a strong challenge toward X’s approach to content moderation and will force Musk to be on his A-game to maintain market share.
