Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after US election | Bluesky

Social media platform Bluesky has added more than 700,000 new users in the week since the US election as users seek to avoid misinformation and offensive posts on X.

The influx, mostly from North America and Britain, helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.

Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offers an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and monitoring harmful behavior.

“It has become a haven for people who want the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.

“The more liberal nature of the Twitter community has now actually escaped from there and seems to have migrated en masse to Bluesky.”

Bluesky began as a project within Twitter, but became an independent company in 2022 and is now primarily owned by CEO Jay Graber.

The platform previously benefited from dissatisfaction with X and its billionaire Elon Musk, who is closely linked to the successful election campaign of US President-elect Donald Trump. Twitter lost millions of users after rebranding to X, and usage in the US fell by more than a fifth in the following seven months.

Bluesky reported in the week following the lockdown of

“We’re excited to welcome all these new people, from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners,” said Bluesky spokeswoman Emily Liu.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor at New York University, had 250,000 followers on X but gained 21,000 followers on her first day on Bluesky this week.

“I’m still with X, but after January, if X could be owned by a de facto member of the Trump administration, its functions as a Trump propaganda conduit and far-right radicalization machine could be accelerated,” she said.

Bluesky is still second only to Threads in the social networking category on Apple’s US App Store, which reached 275 million monthly active users in November, up from 200 million in August.

The independent platform recently added features like direct messaging and video compatibility to become more like X and differentiate itself from its meta competitor.

Ben-Ghiat found the site’s “starter packs,” or groups of people with similar expertise and interests, a refreshing way to get started.

“[They] “I promise to give Bluesky some of what I valued on Twitter/X: informed perspectives on a topic from different angles,” she said.

Bruns, a professor at the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Center, said the explosion in user numbers had led to “growing pains” as new users learned to navigate the site, but ultimately contributed to the site’s momentum.

“It feels like a throwback to the early days of social media craze in a lot of ways, and that’s what’s attracting a lot of people at the moment,” he said. “It just makes the place more lively and active.”

On Monday evening, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that she was “back” on Bluesky, saying, “Good God, it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real people.” Her post was viewed by 27,000 people liked.