By Miriam Bosiljevac
By December 2024, Bluesky has skyrocketed to 24 million users and that number keeps growing. Why has it been experiencing such a surge?
Bluesky is one of the newer microblogging social media platforms that was invite-only until early this year. Even when it fully launched in February, it was mostly populated by early adopters. The average user who had an X account didn’t see the point in switching, because with less than 4 million users reported at the beginning of the year, there wasn’t as much engagement or interaction unless you already came with a group of online friends.
BRAZIL LEAVES X
That all began to change in late August when Elon Musk, the Chairman of X, clashed with the Brazilian Supreme Court. X was subsequently banned in Brazil and a $9,000 fine was set for anyone accessing it with a VPN. With the world’s fifth-largest social media market, 44% of Brazilian online users were on X.
“Good morning everyone,” Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva posted on Bluesky shortly after the nationwide ban. “What do you think of it here?”
Within a week, Bluesky saw a 50% increase in users, with most of the new sign-ups from Brazil.
US ELECTION
But it wasn’t until the US Elected Donald Trump that Bluesky skyrocketed in popularity.
Trump’s early rise in social media was thanks to Twitter. But his brand of posts has become synonymous with inflammatory posts and accounts that have been associated with far-right content.
And X’s owner, Elon Musk, while supporting Trump’s campaign, has also become associated with allowing users on X to post racist or sexist content. Many users though felt the benefits outweighed the toxicity. All that changed the day after Trump was elected, and X lost 115,000 users in just one day.
WHERE DID BLUESKY COME FROM
In 2019, Bluesky was created as a research project at Twitter. The goal was to create a way for it to become decentralized. But by 2021, it was spun out into its own company, launching 2 years later with an invite-only period, where each existing user was occasionally given invite codes for others to join too. By February of this year, it fully launched and it’s since seen explosive growth, reaching over 24 million users in December. Compare that with the 4 million it had when the year started.
Bluesky’s focus on moderation is part of what makes it so appealing. On November 14th, the moderation team on Bluesky reported that they had received more than 42,000 reports from users about things like child sexual abuse posts. It’s banned some well-known extremist accounts, sometimes within 24 hours of creating an account.
How is Bluesky making money
One of the differentiators of Bluesky is the lack of curated feed. There are no sponsored posts or ads, and the content appears as it’s posted. This throwback to the early days of Twitter is part of what some users find appealing. It’s also why media companies and journalists are starting to embrace Bluesky, since followers are seeing the links to articles unlike other social media platforms that frequently throttle or even remove news sites.
But it’s not all a utopia.
The moderation and sharp growth cost money that currently users aren’t paying for. Bluesky announced it would be introducing Premium accounts, but it isn’t clear this will be enough. At the end of October, Bluesky announced they’ve received financing led by Blockchain Capital, and while they say “that technology should serve the user”, some users are skeptical. There’s a fear that by being funded by Crypto-bros, the toxicity of other platforms that have received similar funding will start to seep in.
For now, Bluesky remains a viable alternative for anyone who enjoys microblogging about their everyday life.
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