Bluesky, the social network, conceptualized by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and developed in parallel with Twitter, has seen spectacular growth since the US presidential election, as it hit 20 million users, after averaging 1 million new users per day over the past week.
According to a Nov. 13 post by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, the site had 6 million users in late August, nearly 11 million in late October and hit 15 million users on Nov. 15. It added another 5 million users in just five days, with the explosive growth seen since Nov. 5, the day of the election.
Bluesky has been one of the main beneficiaries of millions of users abandoning Elon Musk's X, seeking to escape misinformation, extreme content, crypto scams, ads, pornography, racism, transphobia and a mess of bots.
Hollywood has been quick to adopt Bluesky, particularly with the entertainment industry's aversion to the political views of Musk, who is known to be a vocal supporter and financial backer of Donald Trump.
In recent weeks, actors, directors, musicians and other prominent figures in the creative industries have rushed to Bluesky as the site became a viable alternative to X to promote work and engage with fans.
Among these renowned entertainment industry figures who have started to migrate over to Bluesky, or have been posting there more than X in recent weeks, are: Barbra Streisand, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Cusack, Ben Stiller, Stephen King, Alyssa Milano, Mia Farrow.
Moreover, a number of major media outlets has also helped boost the microblogging site’s user numbers via their adoption of the platform.
The Guardian, The Economist, The Verge, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Financial Times, The Washington Post, CNN, El Pais, Le Monde, The Times of London, Huff Post, The Daily Beast, Vox, The Onion, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and The Wall Street Journal are only a few of these major media outlets that are all now regularly posting on Bluesky.
Notably, The Guardian announced it would no longer post on its X accounts, after describing Musk's platform as "toxic." The U.K.-based media group added that it had been considering a move to stop posting on X for some time "given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism."
The Guardian added that, "the U.S. presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse."
How is Bluesky different than Twitter?
Like old Twitter, one’s feed is not ruled by an algorithm. Bluesky's open source, decentralized framework gives users a lot more control over how their feed works than X or even Threads, the X alternative Meta has been pushing onto Instagram users.
Despite its rapid growth, Bluesky still has some way to go to compete with X and Meta's Threads, with the former boasting over 300 million monthly active users and the latter over 250 million MAUs.
