 "15 million users and counting: How Bluesky, X rival, is benefiting from Donald Trump’s win")
X’s loss is Bluesky’s gain.
The competitor to X is witnessing a massive influx of users after Donald Trump’s re-election.
The app created by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has gained 1 million new users in the week since the US election.
It now has 15 million users – though that is a drop in the bucket compared to X’s over 500 million users worldwide.
Let’s take a closer look at how Bluesky is gaining users.
What is Bluesky?
First, let’s take a brief look at Bluesky.
The brainchild of Dorsey, the social media platform launched in October 2021.
It has previously seen heavy hitters including US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sign up.
It was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February of this year.
That invite-only period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles X, with a “discover” feed as well a chronological feed for accounts that users follow.
Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find “starter packs” that provide a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow.
Exodus from X
Bluesky gaining users comes in the backdrop of an exodus from X.
Over 115,000 people have left X after the US election, as per CNN.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsEx-CNN anchor Don Lemon, New York Times’ Mara Gay and Charlie Warzel, and actor Jamie Lee Curtis have all announced that they are saying goodbye to the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Curtis on Instagram shared a screenshot of her X account being deactivated with the caption, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.”
Lemon wrote that he is leaving the platform but will continue to use other social media, including Bluesky.
Lemon said he felt X was no longer a place for “honest debate and discussion.”
He noted changes to the site’s terms of service set to go into effect Friday that state lawsuits against X must be filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas rather than the Western District of Texas.
Musk said in July that he was moving X’s headquarters to Texas from San Francisco.
“As the Washington Post recently reported on X’s decision to change the terms, this ‘ensures that such lawsuits will be heard in courthouses that are a hub for conservatives, which experts say could make it easier for X to shield itself from litigation and punish critics,’” Lemon wrote. “I think that speaks for itself.”
The Guardian newspaper also said it would no longer put up posts on X. It blamed “far right conspiracy theories and racism” on the site.
The newspaper in a statement said it “thinks that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.”
Bluesky sees boost
Bluesky, meanwhile, has seen a number of new users sign up or become active.
These include rapper Flavor Flav, author John Chasten Buttigieg, and TV personalities Mehdi Hasan and Molly Jong-Fast.
“Hello Less Hateful World,” billionaire Mark Cuban wrote on the platform on Tuesday.
Company COO Rose Wang told The Verge that the “majority” of the new users on the social network come from the United States.
As per The New York Times, people from Canada and Britain are also joining Bluesky.
Across the platform, new users — among them journalists, left-leaning politicians and celebrities — have posted memes and shared that they were looking forward to using a space free from advertisements and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of the early days of X, when it was still Twitter.
“In the last week, it has felt more like what I used to like about Twitter,” John, 45, who lives in Minnesota, told the newspaper.
Shannon C McGregor, an associate professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, told the newspaper that Bluesky seem to have a “feeling of momentum.”
Much of this has to do with the type of material available on Twitter.
“You were getting this awful timeline of far-right, white supremacist, conspiracy theory posts — which the great majority of people don’t want to interact with on a daily basis,” Dr McGregor added.
Social media researcher Axel Bruns agreed.
Bruns told The Guardian, “It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else.”
“The more liberal kind of Twitter community has really now escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.”
“We’re excited to welcome all of these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners,” Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
The post-election uptick in users isn’t the first time that Bluesky has benefitted from people leaving X.
Bluesky gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August — 85 per cent of them from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in the span of one day last month, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.
‘No Bluesky member with Trump’
Despite Bluesky’s growth, X posted last week that it had “dominated the global conversation on the US election” and had set new records. The platform saw a 15.5 per cent jump in new-user signups on Election Day, X said, with a record 942 million posts worldwide. Representatives for Bluesky and for X did not respond to requests for comment.
Bluesky has referenced its competitive relationship to X through tongue-in-cheeks comments, including an Election Day post on X referencing Musk watching voting results come in with President-elect Donald Trump.
“I can guarantee that no Bluesky team members will be sitting with a presidential candidate tonight and giving them direct access to control what you see online,” Bluesky said.
Musk , of course, who bought X in 2022, has been an ardent supporter of Trump.
His tenure has seen much controversy with advertisers such as IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast fleeing X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general.
Musk has inflamed tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
X, which Musk purchased for $44 billion, is now worth under $10 billion.
With inputs from agencies
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