Social media platform Bluesky has welcomed a wave of new users in the wake of the presidential election, with more than 1.25 million users visiting the site in the past week.
The recent surge appears to coincide with an exodus from in 2022. (On the same day, X.com also received a record 46.5 million visits, according to Internet traffic analyzer SimilarWeb.)
Musk, who endorsed and campaigned for President-elect Donald Trump, has been criticized for lifting online speech restrictions, amplifying his own X-posts and suspending accounts that share opposing political views.
The Guardian announced in a column on Wednesday that its dozens of X accounts, with a total of around 27 million followers, would no longer actively post. “The US presidential election campaign only served to underline what we have been considering for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use his influence to shape political discourse,” the statement said column. . The column did not indicate whether the news organization would join Bluesky.
It’s unclear how many recently defected
Here’s what you need to know about Bluesky:
What is Bluesky?
It is a microblogging platform, similar to X, where users can post short text and photo posts and comment on or share other users’ posts.
Bluesky was originally founded in 2019 by Twitter co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey. In 2021, it officially turned into its own independent company and its current CEO is software engineer Jay Graber, who is the primary owner.
After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, it cut legal and financial ties with Bluesky.
In a post on the platform, the official Bluesky account described itself as “an open social network that gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience.”
While its reach pales in comparison to Meta’s nearly 275 million Thread users and approximately 318 million X users, Bluesky has grown from over 9 million users in September to just over 16 million users as of November 14.
How is Bluesky different from X?
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two platforms is that Bluesky is known as a decentralized platform, while centralized platforms include the likes of X and Facebook.
Let’s break that down.
Posts created on a centralized platform like X or Facebook remain on those individual sites and cannot easily be posted to another site. For example, an X-post cannot easily be shared on a Facebook wall. Every time someone creates a new account on one of these platforms, it’s like moving to a new city, as Bluesky explains on its website. You have to start all over again and are not allowed to take anything from your previous home. You’ll need to connect with new friends, reconnect with old ones, and recreate all new content and posts.
Bluesky’s goal is to eliminate the need for users to start from scratch, so they can move from one social media app to another with their data, friends, and content without having to start from scratch.
Why do some users leave X for Bluesky?
At this time, there is no solid data on how many people specifically left X and joined Bluesky. However, a number of individuals have pointed to the results of the US presidential election – and Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign – as an explanation in their messages, known as ‘skeets’, a cross between ‘sky’ and ‘tweet’.
