The rise of Bluesky and what it could mean for Elon Musk’s X

Elon Musk’s ascendancy within Donald Trump’s circle has driven hordes of anti-Republicans, publishers and public figures from his social media platform X to rival apps.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of dissatisfied X users has been Bluesky, which has added more than a million users since the US presidential election on November 5. As of November 19, it had 20 million accounts up from 16 million before the weekend.
The social network spun out of X, then called Twitter, two years ago, offers a similar interface to X, whereby users can post short messages to their followers. Users can repost or like a post. The app is advertisement-free and allows users to pick custom algorithms that inform the kinds of posts seen in their feeds.
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The format is seen by some users as a sanctuary from X, where users have reported a high level of bots and a rise in offensive posts since Musk, 53, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, dismissed content moderators.
In the wake of the US election, new Bluesky users said they had abandoned X in search of a community of more like-minded liberals.
“Anxiety, Elon Musk and Donald Trump brought me here,” one wrote.
Another said: “So I’ve moved from the other place — I’m political (centre left), Gay, own a springer spaniel & have MS… I’m a chilled guy that doesn’t need the rightwingers on the other place in my feed ;)”
Last week The Guardian said it would no longer post to X, citing “disturbing content” on the platform, including racism and conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor who is suing Musk in California after his show on X was cancelled, said he was quitting the app over a change in its terms of service, starting last Friday, to mandate that all lawsuits against X be filed in Texas courts. Critics say those courts are more likely to be friendly towards the entrepreneur and X. Lemon shared links to his alternative social media accounts, including on Bluesky.
In August, Bluesky reported a surge in UK users in the days after Musk’s controversial comments on the nationwide riots prompted people to look for alternatives to X.
Total Bluesky users have climbed to around 20 million, from about 13 million at the end of October.
That means the platform is still far smaller in influence than X, which Musk has claimed has 600 million monthly active users. Threads, the X rival developed by the Facebook owner Meta Platforms, has about 275 million users. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, said last month that Threads was attracting one million sign-ups a day and was on track to becoming its “next major social app”.
Bluesky was conceived in 2019 by Jack Dorsey, then chief executive of Twitter, as a project within the organisation to create a standard protocol, or open-source framework, for building social networks.
The concept of a decentralised social media model means different apps can coexist in one interoperable system where there is no central authority in control.
Users can more easily move their social identity between apps and services, and transport their relationships with other users with them. Bluesky has developed its own app to show how the protocol works and help develop the model.
The protocol was created amid fierce debates about how platforms should be moderated, with social media bosses including Dorsey, 47, and Zuckerberg, 40, accused of either censoring users too much or not enough.
In decentralised social networks, users can pick their own experience of what content they want to see, including whether to include warnings about certain content or remove content from their feeds.
Bluesky also has a moderation team, which it says is “dedicated to providing around-the-clock coverage to uphold our community guidelines”.
In an apparent swipe at Musk and Zuckerberg this year, Bluesky said: “Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see. On an open social network like Bluesky, you can shape your experience for yourself.”
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The venture was spun out of Twitter in 2022, months before Twitter was acquired by Musk in a $44 billion deal.
Before Bluesky’s separation from Twitter, Jay Graber, an American software engineer who had been working on her own social media app to rival Facebook, was appointed chief executive.
Graber, 33, has remained in the role.
As an independent company, Bluesky operates as a public benefit corporation, a for-profit business that directs any profits back into its mission of developing the large-scale adoption of technologies for open public conversations on an open protocol.
Bluesky is owned by Graber and its employees, including a 20-strong core team, moderators and support agents.
Last year it raised $8 million from investors and in October secured $15 million from Blockchain Capital, a venture capital firm.
Its board of directors consists of Graber; Jeremie Miller, the inventor of Jabber, an early technology for instant messaging; Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, a blog; and Kinjal Shah, general partner at Blockchain Capital. Dorsey resigned from the board in May.
The company has pledged to keep Bluesky free to use, but plans to introduce a paid premium subscription offering profile customisation tools and higher-quality video uploads.
In a post last month, Rose Wang, chief operating officer of Bluesky, said: “Subscription revenue helps us improve the app, grow the developer ecosystem and gives us time to explore business models beyond traditional ads.”
This week Bluesky was number one on the Apple App Store, followed by Threads.
Scott Kessler, technology, media and communications analyst at Third Bridge Group, a New York-based investment research firm, said one of the biggest challenges for Bluesky was “being able to gain enough critical mass to provide requisite value for users and perhaps, ultimately, other stakeholders”.
He added: “I think people, for a couple of years at this point, if not longer, have been seriously thinking about and even looking for a would-be successor to Twitter, and I think it’s been hard to arrive at who or what that would be. I think it’s premature to suggest that Bluesky might be that company, because I think ultimately it’s unclear if there is really going to be any successor.”
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