 "What is social media platform Bluesky which people are leaving X for?")
Bluesky is on a tear.
The social media platform has gained an influx of users after Donald Trump’s re-election as president.
This, as a number of people including journalists and celebrities have bid goodbye to X.
But what is Bluesky? What do we know about it? And how many people have jumped ship?
Let’s take a closer look:
What is it?
Bluesky is an alternative social media platform.
The platform is the brainchild of ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
It was created by Dorsey in 2019 as a project inside Twitter, as per The Guardian.
Dorsey at the time said he would fund developers to create an “open and decentralised standard for social media.”
The company became an independent venture in 2021.
It is helmed by CEO Jay Graber – who is also its owner.
According to CNET, Bluesky’s name comes from Twitter – as in the ‘bird’ flying freely in the sky.
Dorsey left the company in May after the social media site added moderation tools.
It is built on what is known as the authenticated transport protocol
Until February, Bluesky was an exclusive platform – you could only join via invite.
That period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other features.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe platform resembles Musk’s X, with a “discover” feed and 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.
According to The Guardian, Bluesky offers its users a more custom made experience.
“Imagine you want your timeline to only be posts from your mutuals, or only posts that have cat photos, or only posts related to sports – you can simply pick your feed of choice from an open marketplace,” a blog post on the site states.
Unlike X, it also lets users put website addresses as their handles.
It also promotes an “anti-toxicity” approach to social media – which is starkly in contrast with X, which recently made changes to its block feature to allow those who have been blocked by users to see their posts.
While Bluesky remains small compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk .
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.
The Guardian last week said it would no longer post on X.
The newspaper cited “far right conspiracy theories and racism” on the platform as the reason.
At the same time, television journalist Don Lemon posted on X 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.”
Actor Jamie Lee Curtis and a couple of journalists from The New York Times also joined Bluesky.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, Lizzo, Barbara Streisand, Quinta Burnson, Ben Stiller, Flavor Flav, Carrie Coon and John Cusack are among the big stars to begin using Bluesky.
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandra Orcasio-Cortez, who previously joined the platform, has become active on it.
So has billionaire Mark Cuban.
Cuban, who backed Kamala Harris during the US presidential campaign, wrote on the platform last week, “Hello less hateful world.”
The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal have all recently joined the platform.
Bluesky, though, has bigger ambitions than to supplant X.
Beyond the platform itself, it is building a technical foundation — what it calls “a protocol for public conversation” — that could make social networks work across different platforms — also known as interoperability — like email, blogs or phone numbers.
Currently, you can’t cross between social platforms to leave a comment on someone’s account. Twitter users must stay on Twitter and TikTok users must stay on TikTok if they want to interact with accounts on those services. Big Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-focused business models.
Bluesky is trying to reimagine all of this and working toward interoperability.
How many people have jumped ship?
In recent days, it has gained millions of new users from the America, Canada and the UK – though mostly from the United States.
As per ABC, it now has over 18 million users across the world.
The platform is gaining 10,000 new users every 10 to 15 minutes.
This, as over 115,000 people have left X since the election, according to data from SimilarWeb.
According to CNET, Bluesky last week hit number 1 on the US’ app store.
In October, it was number 181 on the chart.
X has been criticised for frequently letting misinformation go viral and platforming far-right celebrities and airing conspiracy theories.
“Outsized growth, particularly for Bluesky, may have been driven by a rise of controversial content or technical issues on competitor X," Abraham Yousef, senior insights analyst at market intelligence firm Sensor Tower told Reuters.
“The departure of popular accounts, media personalities, or organisations, may have led consumers to conclude that X is no longer their preferred platform, which could also be fuelling growth on other platforms, particularly Bluesky and Threads.”
The post-election uptick in users isn’t the first time Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X.
The platform 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 one day in October, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.
Last year, advertisers such as IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast fled X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Despite Bluesky’s growth, X posted after the election that it had “dominated the global conversation on the US election” and had set new records.
With inputs from agencies
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