5 days Ago
Twitter/X has made a number of controversial and at times, unpopular, changes to the social media platform over the past two years. Musk’s involvement in the 2024 Presidential election and becoming an member of the incoming Donald Trump administration amid this polarizing political environment has led to the growth of Bluesky — a nascent and alternative social media platform which, of late, has been rapidly increasing the number of accounts. Bluesky was developed in 2019 by then Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey.
It was originally conceived as a research project to decentralize Twitter. In 2021, Bluesky was launched as a separate independent company with Jay Gruber as CEO. In 2023, Bluesky had an “invite-only” launch for users.
Last February, Bluesky changed from invitation-only to becoming available to the general public. In September 2022, Bluesky had two million users which grew to nine million users one year later. On November 15, the number of users doubled from September to 18 million and still growing.
Of late, CEO Gruber posted the number of Bluesky users has been growing another 10,000 every 10-to-15 minutes . In addition, a growing number of familiar names have recently canceled X for Bluesky inviting their followers to join. This recent surge in accounts is coming primarily from the U.
S., U.K.
and Canada. The recent surge in the number of accounts has, however, resulted in the website going down at times. Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion (and in the process, did not include Bluesky).
The following July, Musk renamed it X. Among the other changes included personnel cutbacks, charging a fee for a verification (blue check) account and relaxing guardrails that had been put in place. Some of these policy changes had alienated many.
These include reactivating previously banned accounts, a steady stream of misinformation and content not considered brand safe for advertisers. More recently, X announced a new policy that spelled out any posts on the social media network gives them license to “analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type." Bluesky said, it had “no intention, of using social media posts for the purpose of training Generative AI tools.
” Last April, X had a reported 611 million global users, which dropped to 588 million users in September. The losses have been greatest in the U.S.
and U.K., and a YouGov survey from last August reported that 42% of daily X users have a negative opinion of the microblogging site.
Further alienating some X users, Elon Musk had become actively involved in the 2024 Presidential campaign. The multibillionaire’s Super PAC spent a reported $200 million in helping to get Donald Trump elected. On November 12, President-elect Trump announced that Donald Trump announced Elon Musk along with Vivek Ramaswamy would be running the new “Department of Government Efficiency” in his second administration.
Bluesky’s recent growth has been in reaction to the ongoing changes in the policy of X as well as Musk’s role as a campaign contributor and member of the incoming Presidential administration. On November 6, the day after Election Day, Similarweb, a company that measures web traffic, reported 116,000 had deactivated their X account, the largest single-day exodus since Musk acquired the company. On that same day, Bluesky's website had approximately 1.
2 million visitors. When the New York Times reported Musk would be spending election night with Trump. The Bluesky account on X posted, “i can guarantee that no bluesky team members will be sitting with a presidential candidate tonight and giving them direct access to control what you see online.
” Besides X, Musk is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. According to Forbes , the 53-year-old Musk is the world’s wealthiest person with a current net worth of $303 billion. It was estimated Musk’s net worth grew by $50 billion in the aftermath of Trump getting elected President.
This recent flurry in users was not the first time Bluesky benefited from X users deactivating their account. Last August, a decision by a Brazilian court had temporarily banned X in their country. The court had ordered that X suspend some accounts, which Musk did not comply with.
The ruling resulted in millions dropping X. One beneficiary was Bluesky which saw an increase in users of 500,000 over a three-day period starting on August 28. Overall, during Brazil’s three-week ban of X, Bluesky added three million users .
Bluesky has a decentralized social media website, enabling users to produce their own servers to store data and develop their own rules instead of the company. In addition, Bluesky allows users to block other users, a one-time popular feature on X which has since been changed by Musk. Similar to X, there is a 256-character limit (called skeets) along with such features as images, videos and re-posting.
In an email, Damian Rollison, SOCi’s director of market insights commented, “The political division that has spurred the recent growth of Bluesky's user base is perhaps nothing to celebrate, but the concept of a decentralized social network, providing greater control to user communities and relying less on the monetization of user engagement, is a healthy move that hearkens back to the early, more egalitarian days of the internet. So too, the time is ripe for disruption of incumbent technologies with new ideas. Consider that Google's search engine is 26 years old; Facebook's social platform just turned 20; and Twitter, now X, debuted a full 18 years ago in 2006.
Though these platforms have established themselves as the norm in their respective fields, they've also left many users frustrated with their perceived biases and limitations. A proliferation of alternatives, as long as it leads to better communication, should be seen as a good thing.” Another platform that has served as an alternative is Meta's Threads.
Threads was launched in July 2023 as an alternate social media network for users unhappy with X. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced it has 275 million monthly active users up from 200 million in August and 150 million in April. Instagram’s Adam Mossieri noted Threads has over 15 million additional users since the election.
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