In this illustration, the Bluesky Social logo is displayed on a mobile phone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on September 4, 2024.
Mauro Pimentel | AFP | Getty Images
Microblogging startup Bluesky gained more than 1.25 million new users last week, suggesting that some social media users are changing their habits following the US presidential election.
Bluesky's user influx shows that the app was able to position itself as an alternative to App X, formerly Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, as well as dead Topics. The company said on Wednesday that the bulk of new users come from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
“We're excited to welcome everyone looking for a better social media experience,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told CNBC in a statement.
Despite the rise in users, Bluesky's overall base remains a small fraction of that of its competitors. The Seattle startup claims a total number of users of 15.2 million. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October that Threads has approximately 275 million monthly users. Musk claimed in May that X had 600 million monthly users, but market intelligence firm Sensor Tower pegged X's monthly user base at 318 million users in October.
Created in 2019 as a project within Twitter, when Jack Dorsey was still CEO, Bluesky does not run ads and has not yet developed a business model. It became an independent company in 2021. Dorsey said in May of this year that he would no longer serve on BlueSky's board.
“Journalists, politicians, and news junkies have also talked about Bluesky as an X-better alternative to Threads,” Sameweb, an Internet traffic monitoring service, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
Some users with new Bluesky accounts posted that they moved to the service because of Musk and his support for President-elect Donald Trump.
“It's shocking that Elon Musk is turning Twitter into a Trump propaganda machine, full of disinformation and misinformation,” one user on Bluesky said.
This is Bluesky's second notable surge in the past two months.
Bluesky said it attracted 2 million new users in September after Brazil's Supreme Court suspended App X in the country for failing to comply with regional content moderation policies and not appointing a local representative.
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