The social media platform Bluesky has welcomed a wave of new users in the wake of the presidential election, with more than 1.25 million flocking to the site in the last week.
The recent surge seems to be happening in tandem with an exodus from X, formerly known as Twitter, which saw 115,000 account deactivations on Nov. 6, the day after the election, the largest number to leave the platform since tech billionaire Elon Musk bought it in 2022. (On the same day, X.com also received a record setting 46.5 million visits, according to internet traffic analyzer Similarweb.)
Musk, who endorsed and campaigned for president-elect Donald Trump, has been criticized for removing online speech restrictions, amplifying his own X posts and suspending accounts that share opposing political views.
The Guardian announced in a column on Wednesday that its dozens of X accounts, with a total of about 27 million followers, would no longer actively post. “The US 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,” the column reads. The column didn’t indicate if the news organization would join Bluesky.
It’s unclear how many recently defected X users account for Bluesky’s burgeoning new membership ranks, but some anecdotal posts shared to the latter platform suggest that a number of users have found it to be a more hospitable alternative to the site run by Musk.
Here’s what to know about Bluesky:
It’s a microblogging platform, similar to X, where users can post brief text and photo posts, and reply to or share other users’ posts.
In fact, Bluesky was originally created by Twitter co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019. It officially spun off into its own independent company in 2021 and its current CEO is software engineer Jay Graber, who is the primary owner.
After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, it severed legal and financial ties with Bluesky.
In a post on the platform, the official Bluesky account described itself as “an open social network that gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience.”
While its reach pales in comparison to Meta’s nearly 275 million Thread users and roughly 318 million X users, Bluesky has grown from over 9 million users in September to just over 16 million users as of Nov. 14.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two platforms is that Bluesky is known as a decentralized platform, while centralized platforms are ones like X and Facebook.
Let’s break that down.
Posts created on a centralized platform like X or Facebook remain on those individual sites and can’t be easily cross-posted on a different site. An X post cannot be easily shared on a Facebook wall, for example. Every time a person creates a new account on one of these platforms, it’s like moving to a new city, as Bluesky explains on its website. You have to start from scratch and can’t take anything with you from your previous home. You have to connect with new friends, reconnect with old ones and re-create all new content and posts.
Bluesky’s goal is to eliminate the need for users to start from scratch so they can move with their data, friends and content from one social media app to another without having to start all over.
At this point there is no solid data on the number of people that have specifically left X in favor of joining Bluesky. However, a number of individuals have pointed to the results of the U.S. presidential election — and Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign — as an explanation in their posts, known as “skeets,” a cross between “sky” and “tweet.”
