Bluesky is continuing to blow up. The Twitter-like service and alternative to Elon Musk’s X, has now surpassed 16 million users after seeing rapid growth in the days following the U.S. presidential election. While many are leaving X over the service’s increasing right-wing leanings and Musk’s campaigning for Trump, others are unhappy with other changes Musk has made — like how blocks work or how their content on X will be used to train AI.
Despite those issues, X is still the leader in the space in terms of monthly active users, while Threads is quickly catching up. Meta announced on Thursday that Threads grew by over 15 million users in November alone, for instance. Earlier this month, Threads said it had 275 million monthly active users.
But if Threads is the Big Tech threat to X, Bluesky is the indie effort. It’s already bigger than Mastodon, another decentralized X competitor that now has 7.6 million users, less than a million of whom log in monthly. (The wider fediverse built on the ActivityPub protocol, however, has over 10.8 million users.)
If Bluesky’s growth continues, it may begin to affect X. According to analytics provider Similarweb, X has now seen the largest number of account deactivations since Musk acquired the company, previously known as Twitter.
The firm based its findings on the number of visits to the confirmation webpage that appears after users indicate they want to deactivate their X accounts.
On Wednesday, X saw more than 115,000 U.S. web visitors deactivating their accounts, Similarweb found — more than any other day during Musk’s tenure. Previously, the peak had been around 65,000 on December 15, 2023, after Musk had restored the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. (The tracking firm is not able to track the number of X users who deactivate their accounts via the X mobile app, indicating the true number is much higher.)
Image Credits:Similarweb
A Twitter clone? Not exactly!
While on the surface Bluesky looks and feels a lot like X, its underpinnings are quite different.
The app offers a familiar feature set, including the ability to create and share short text posts that can include accompanying media like photos, videos, GIFs, and links. As on X, these posts can be liked, reposted, replied to, or shared via direct messages. There are also standard blocking and reporting tools, plus tools for muting threads, words, and hashtags. Users can send private messages to others, too, and create lists.
Image Credits:Bluesky screenshot
But Bluesky’s promise is that of a social network that puts its users in control. Designed to be decentralized, the company has begun offering federation, meaning anyone can host their own data. The idea is similar to the decentralized X alternative Mastodon …