Bluesky the social media rival to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads is finally having its moment with millions of users in bound to the platform while its biggest rival witnesses the record number of deactivations. The platform has provided an avenue to users who have been disenchanted with various changes brought in Elon Musk to X and his crystal clear political leaning towards Donald Trump.
What is Bluesky?
While Bluesky is perhaps the biggest competitor to X today, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, Bluesky started as a project under Jack Dorsey’s Twitter with the motive of creating a ‘decentralized’ social network. Later on, it transitionted to an independent entity in 2021 with Jay Graber serving as its CEO.
However, with Elon Musk acquiring Twitter in 2022, the company cut all ties with Bluesky. The platform later revealed having received $23 million of funding in two rounds. Jack Dorsey also distanced himself away from the company, stating that he was making some of the mistakes with Bluesky when he was at Twitter.
Initially, Bluesky started as an invite-only platform but opened up to all users in February this year. Since then, while the platform has continued to be in limelight, it never looked threatening to either X or Threads.
The week-long ban on X in Brazil in August provided Bluesky the perfect opportunity to stand as its rival. The platform gained 2.6 million users when X remained inaccessible in Latin America’s largest country. The platform gained 500,000 users on another day in October when Elon Musk rolled out a change for X that would allow blocked users to see public posts of the user they have blocked by.
However, the ultimate lime light moment for Bluesky as its biggest rival X saw a massive exodus of users after Donald Trump’s victory in US elections. According to Similarweb data, X had record 42.3 million users visiting it on US Election Day followed by a record number of deactivations. Around 1.8 million users left the owned platform between November 5 and November 12.
This proved to be the ultimate test for Bluesky that saw its all time users more than double from around 9 million in early Septmeber to over 19 million as of writing this article.
Is Bluesky ahead of Threads as main Twitter/X rival?
Bluesky received more web visits than Threads immediately after the US elections. It also quickly became the top free app on iOS, leaving behind Threads, ChatGPT, TikTok and the rest.
However, Threads continues to lead in terms of app usage after the elections. Moreover, Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently confirmed that Threads had gained over 15 million users in the first half of 2024, almost the lifetime userbase of Bluesky.
Meanwhile, perhaps sensing the way currents are flowing, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed that the company is planning to create a dedicated feed, akin to one of the most popular feature provided by Bluesky.
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Published: 18 Nov 2024, 03:44 PM IST
