In this photo illustration, the Bluesky Social logo is displayed on a cell phone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on September 4, 2024.
Mauro Pimentel | AFP | Getty Images
Micro-blogging startup Bluesky has gained over 1.25 million new users in the past week, indicating some social media users are changing their habits following the U.S. presidential election.
Bluesky’s influx of users shows that the app has been able to pitch itself as an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk, as well as Meta’s Threads. The bulk of the new users are coming from the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, the company said Wednesday.
“We’re excited to welcome everyone looking for a better social media experience,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told CNBC in a statement.
Despite the surge of users, Bluesky’s total base remains a fraction of its rivals’. The Seattle startup claims 15.2 million total users. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in October said Threads had nearly 275 million monthly users. Musk in May claimed that X had 600 million monthly users, but market intelligence firm Sensor Tower pegged X’s monthly base at 318 million users in October.
Created in 2019 as a project inside Twitter, when Jack Dorsey was still CEO, Bluesky doesn’t show ads and has yet to develop a business model. It became an independent company in 2021. Dorsey said in May of this year that he’s no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“Journalists, politicians, and news junkies have also been talking up Bluesky as a better X alternative than Threads,” wrote Similarweb, the internet traffic and monitoring service, in a Tuesday blog.
Some users with new Bluesky accounts posted that they had moved to the service due to Musk and his support for President-elect Donald Trump.
“It’s appalling that Elon Musk has transformed Twitter into a Trump propaganda machine, rife with disinformation and misinformation,” one user posted on Bluesky.
This is Bluesky’s second notable surge in the last couple of months.
Bluesky said it picked up 2 million new users in September after the Brazilian Supreme Court suspended X in the country for failing to comply with regional content moderation policies and not appointing a local representative.
