It’s unusual for a new social media service to get a foothold in a marketplace entrenched by the likes of X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and TikTok which, dominate people’s phones. But Bluesky, a nearly 2-year-old app, is now grabbing attention amid a recent surge of new users, which the company says is likely due to growing frustrations with X.
While the platform has grown since it opened as an invite-only service in February 2023, its membership snowballed following the November 5 presidential election. Bluesky currently has more than 22 million users, up from about 12 million people in mid-October, according to the company’s data.
Bluesky believes its recent growth is partly due to changes at X under billionaire owner Elon Musk, according to Bluesky Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang, who recently spoke to CBS MoneyWatch.
Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, has overhauled the service, changing its name to X and prioritizing accounts from people who pay for a blue checkmark — although accounts with more than 2,500 “verified subscriber followers” get access to Premium features for free.
Ad sales almost immediately softened after Musk took over the platform, with companies including Apple, Coca-Cola and Disney removing paid ads from X last year. Most recently, The Guardian said it would no longer be posting its content under its official account on X. In its announcement, the British newspaper described X as “toxic,” adding that the platform has been used by Musk to shape political discourse.
Musk became one of the most viral voices on elections during the 2024 campaign, frequently sharing conspiratorial narratives while promoting President-elect Donald Trump, a CBS News investigation found.
When Twitter became X, “it was no longer a public town square, and now it’s more of a partisan microphone,” Wang said, adding, “that is a big reason why we think people are coming over.”
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bluesky resembles the “old Twitter” in terms of layout and content, wrote PCWorld tech writer Dave Parrack in a recent column. He added, “Bluesky feels like a safe haven. There’s very little trolling, and when it does happen, people aren’t biting.”
Bluesky users can find people to follow through so-called “starter packs,” or curated lists of people to follow by interest or fields, such as this group of garden writers. That enables users to quickly build a feed of posts from people that they pick, rather than being fed content by a corporate algorithm, the company says.
Because people can tailor their interests and connect with other like-minded users, there’s more interaction on the service than on X, according to Wang.
Some companies are also reporting more engagement with their posts on the Bluesky app versus rival platforms. An executive for The Boston Globe, for instance noted that the newspaper’s posts on Bluesky receive three times the traffic as on Meta’s Threads.
“Thirty percent of users Bluesky are posters versus 1% on Twitter,” Wang said.
Even so, it’s questionable whether Bluesky’s jump in new users is making much of a dent in X’s consumer base.
The presidential election delivered a surge in traffic to Musk’s social media service, according to tracking service Similarweb. It found that more than 46 million U.S. users visited X on November 6, the day after President-elect Donald Trump’s win — more than any day in the prior year. About 115,000 people in the U.S. deactivated their accounts on X that same day, its data shows.
While Bluesky’s user base is growing quickly, the company remains small in terms of its funding and staff, which Wang describes as “a tiny team of 20” employees, including herself and CEO Jay Graber. The service was created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, although the business has been independent since 2021.
In October, the company raised $15 million in venture funding, which followed a seed round of $8 million in 2023. Wang noted that Bluesky is focused on figuring out how to sustain its business, which will soon include new revenue streams from subscriptions and financial transactions.
“We are launching subscriptions at the end of this year,” Wang noted. “It’ll be custom aesthetics, custom avatar frames, maybe more video uploads.”
The company is also planning to enable financial transactions between users, such as if a game designer wants to sell his or her products to Bluesky users. The service would take a portion of the payment, Wang noted.
Bluesky doesn’t accept advertising, nor has it marketed itself in the wake of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, she added.
To be sure, Bluesky may never achieve the size of bigger social media networks, which advertisers flock to in order to reach much larger groups of users. For instance, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, had more than 3 billion daily users across its apps in the most recent quarter, and booked almost $40 billion in revenue during that time.
Bluesky opened as an invitation-only platform in February 2023, but anyone can now sign up for the service.
User handles on the service are a little bit different than X or other social media networks because they end with the site’s domain, .bsky.social. Posts are limited to 300 characters, 20 more than on X. Photos and videos can also uploaded, though videos can’t be longer than 60 seconds. GIFs and emojis are available, too.
As with other platforms, you can tag people on Bluesky by typing “@” before their username, you can like posts by tapping a heart icon, and use hashtags to highlight a theme. Bluesky has added a menu to hashtags, so that when users click on one they’ll get different options for seeing, or muting, posts on a particular topic.
“It’s more of a community space — it’s more of a Reddit model, where you land in those cosy corners,” Wang added. “At the end of the day it’s all about the people, and what I encourage people to do is just come to Bluesky, give it a chance and see for yourself what the experience is like.”
