What is Bluesky? The App That Has Seen Influx of X and Threads Users

Social media platform Bluesky has seen a surge in users in recent weeks; the app’s rapid growth has reportedly narrowed the gap to competitors X and Threads.

Over the past few weeks, Bluesky’s growth has exploded, more than doubling to 20 million users worldwide (as of Tuesday) — up from nine million in September.

It has also rocketed to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app store charts as the most downloaded free app. On the U.S. App Store, Bluesky became the number one app on November 13 and has not lost its position since.

The influx of users, largely from North America and the UK, has reportedly come as people seek alternatives to X, Facebook, and Threads since the U.S. election.

According to TechCrunch, Bluesky’s user base is still much smaller than Threads, which recently reported north of 275 million monthly active users.

However, data by market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that if Bluesky’s current rate of growth holds up, it could catch up with Threads in time.

Similarweb’s data indicates that Threads had five times more daily active users (DAUs) than Bluesky ahead of the U.S. election, But, on November 15, a peak day of activity for Bluesky, Threads’ lead over Bluesky had been reduced to just 1.5x in the U.S.

TechCrunch reports that Instagram head Adam Mosseri has denied that Similarweb’s data is accurate, but parent company Meta does not share DAUs for Threads.

X still remains dominant. The U.S. daily active user count is more than 10 times larger than Bluesky at present.

However, Similarweb’s data suggests that X users have flocked Bluesky in droves, and may be the reason behind the social media platform’s recent uptick in traffic.

On the day after the presidential election, over 115,000 X users deactivated their accounts, the largest-ever mass exit from the platform formerly known as Twitter. At the same time, traffic on Bluesky began to soar, with daily usage climbing some 500% in the U.S.

Bluesky also reported picking up 1.2 million users in the two days after X owner Elon Musk announced that the platform would allow users to view posts from people who had blocked them.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky started out as idea from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey who said he hoped to build a “decentralized” social network. While Bluesky was initially developed inside Twitter, it became an independent company in 2022, and is now primarily owned by CEO Jay Graber.

Bluesky launched as an invite-only beta app in early 2023, before opening its gates to everyone in February 2024. By then, the platform had attracted over three million users.

Bluesky is a decentralized social media app that has a similar look and feel to X. The platform also recently added features including direct messaging and video compatibility to more closely resemble X and distinguish itself from Threads.

The app itself functions much like X, where a user can click a plus button to create a post of 256 characters, which can also include photos. Posts themselves can be replied to, retweeted, liked and from a three-dot menu, reported, shared via the iOS Share Sheet to other apps, or copied as text.

However, rather than having one “master algorithm,” Bluesky allows for a more personalized experience. By default, there are three main feeds: One shows accounts a user follows, another shows what their friends follow and a “discover” feed surfaces posts linked to their interests.

Bluesky allows users to reach beyond these three by developing their own customized algorithm for content such as cats, or only posts about photography. Because of this customization, Graber tells NPR there are more than 50,000 different Bluesky feeds available.

“We’ve been growing by about a million users a day for several days,” Bluesky Graber tells NPR in an interview on Monday.

“It’s proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they’ll have a better time.”