How Bluesky Grew From A Twitter Side Project To An X Competitor

Lately, there's been a lot of chatter about a new social media platform. Social media sites and X competitor, Bluesky, now sitting above 21 million users on the platform. Bluesky says it has seen a million new users since the presidential election.

Bluesky is rapidly becoming the go-to place for refugees from X. Bluesky is a decentralized social media platform and the brainchild of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who conceived Bluesky as a side project inside Twitter in 2019. Bluesky, which is no longer affiliated with Dorsey, is now its own company, and following the U.

S . election, the platform got an influx of new users, mostly from individuals looking to flee X. Some of those users include billionaire Mark Cuban, New York Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and author Stephen King, among others.

I think there's a couple of things that are drawing users into Bluesky. Primarily, it's the fact that there's no billionaire associated with Bluesky, right? So if you go to Threads, you're still within the Zuckerberg empire.

If you go to X that's associated with Elon Musk. So for a lot of users, Bluesky is a healthy alternative for them. We're building an open source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on.

And it's something that is radically different from anything that's been done in social media before. At the end of the day, most social media platforms are trying to win over advertisers and not the end user. And so what we've done at Bluesky is we have prioritized the end user as our primary citizen on our platform.

In other words, Bluesky has promised to give power to the people to decide how they experience social media. The platform currently does not host ads to pay its bills, which is the business model of many other social media platforms, though its leadership has not ruled that out in the future. But whether the platform can avoid some of the pitfalls of past social media companies and continue its impressive growth as the dust settles after the election remains to be seen.

On the surface, Bluesky looks and feels a lot like old Twitter. Users can write short posts and include a photo or short video. They can also interact with the posts of others by either commenting, liking, or reposting the original post.

Users' feeds consist of the people they follow as well as any other feeds they decide to subscribe to. We have about maybe five cat feeds, more than 250 Swifty feeds, and various other feeds that are either organized chronologically or based on what your followers are liking. There's the discover feed that I think is showing you content from all across Bluesky.

Then there's just your follower feed. So, it's nothing but content from the folks that you have specifically opted into receiving content from. So I think just making that choice is very different than what we get from Threads, or X, or Instagram, TikTok.

Bluesky became an independent company in 2021, after Dorsey tapped Jay Graber to lead the new venture as CEO. In October 2022, Bluesky opened up a waitlist for its Bluesky app to beta users. That same month, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter.

Bluesky, which was initially invite only, opened up to everyone in early 2024. Unlike conventional social media platforms, Bluesky is designed to be decentralized and give users a greater degree of control over what they see or don't see, as well as their data. As the social media platforms got larger, you have this centralization of curation.

The platform gets to decide what the feed algorithm is, so what sort of content you get to see. And it also gets to decide what sort of content is permissible or not permissible on the platform. More recently, you see platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon taking off, and people also just exploring back to like the community roots.

We don't control what you see on Bluesky. There's no single algorithm showing you things. You can browse a marketplace of algorithms built by other people.

You can build your own algorithm, if you want to see just cats or just art, you can do that. Threads rolled out a similar feature in November, allowing users more control over their algorithm with custom feeds. Bluesky is also decentralized in its physical infrastructure.

Unlike traditional social media platforms, which host user data on the company's servers, Bluesky gives users the option to host their data on their own servers, though experts say the majority of users still use Bluesky's maintained server. The platform also allows users to port over any of their existing posts, likes and followers to a new platform should they choose to leave Bluesky. Bluesky's leadership says this makes the platform "billionaire-proof.

" If someone bought Bluesky, or if the Bluesky company went down. Everything is open source. This means that someone else could pick it up and run with it.

This means that what happened to Twitter couldn't happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over. But at the end of the day, Bluesky is still a business, and it will eventually need to figure out how to make money. In May of 2024, Dorsey left the platform's board over disagreements over the strategy that Bluesky was taking.

The biggest thing that Dorsey disagreed with when it comes to Bluesky strategy is the fact that Bluesky went out and has raised funding from venture capital. It's essentially starting out the same way that we've seen most other social networks start out, whether it be Facebook or Twitter. It's going to have a lot of the same incentives as those other social networks that have come before it.

In an interview with Pirate Wires, Dorsey explained that Bluesky was repeating Twitter's mistakes, saying everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that is not what I intended to help create. Upon his departure, Bluesky thanked Dorsey for his help, but did not say much else.

In lieu of Bluesky, Dorsey has invested in Nostr, an open source protocol on which developers can help build apps, such as the social network. Nostr is not affiliated with any company. Bluesky is also run on a decentralized protocol known as the AT protocol.

If you think about email or text messaging, for example, the interface for Gmail is quite different in comparison to, say, Yahoo or some other email provider. But if I send you an email from this account, you should still receive it and get the gist of it on the other platform. Same with text message.

So what companies like Bluesky are doing with these protocols is essentially bringing that same approach but to social media. So, perhaps in the future you post something on Bluesky and you can see it on a rival app. At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory.

In practice, Bluesky's protocol doesn't currently work with the protocols of some of its of its competitors. For example, Threads and Mastodon, another decentralized social media platform, both utilize the ActivityPub protocol, which is incompatible with Bluesky's AT protocol. Another key aspect of Blue sky's functionality is that it lets users create and run their own moderation services, which layer on top of Bluesky's default community guidelines by using labels to dictate what content users want to see.

So if you want to hear about the news, you can go to the newsfeed. But if you want to tune out politics, you can use the politics labeler and then hide all the politics from your feed and just look at other things. Users can also subscribe to particular labelers.

So, these are people who are going in and providing labels to individual posts or to people. What that then allows is then I, as a user, can look at all the labelers that are out there. Decide, here's a particular labeler that I trust, and then I can then see those labels when I am viewing my feed.

As of January, Blue sky had over 27 million registered users. The 26-person company has raised $36 million so far, and is reportedly valued at $700 million. Bluesky's user base got a big boost in September after Brazil temporarily suspended rival X for failing to comply with regional content moderation policies.

Another influx of users came over the month of November and into December following the U. S . election.

While Bluesky's user numbers are a far cry from those of its major competitors X and Meta's Threads, which are estimated to have around 600 million and 300 million monthly active users, respectively. Experts say that Bluesky's growth was nonetheless impressive. The growth numbers for Bluesky are wild.

I think it's really because there's this vacuum being left right by old Twitter when Elon Musk took over Twitter and it kind of became X, things changed a lot, right? You know, content moderation changed. He changed the pricing options.

As he kind of navigated that transition, he lost a lot of people. After Elon Musk took over in 2022, he reinstated thousands of previously banned accounts, and slashed around 80% of the platform's workforce, including many of the platform's content moderators. A proliferation of hate speech on the platform led to an exodus of advertisers.

Musk had some pointed words for them. So if somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f*#k yourself. But users also fled.

Data from internet traffic firm Similarweb shows that deactivations of accounts in the U. S . surged on November 6th, with over 100,000 people choosing to leave the platform in a day.

Another study shows that X will continue to lose users, with an estimated 7 million users in the U. S . expected to quit the platform between 2022 and 2025.

This is a platform that now seems to cater more pointedly toward right leaning or conservative users. And so I think for folks who maybe don't want to be presented with that kind of content. So in their face, Bluesky is an area that, for all intents and purposes, the mechanisms are the same, but the vibe is completely different.

Despite its rapid success, some experts question if Bluesky can continue growing at the pace that it's been. User growth is already slowing. One analysis showed that Blue sky's daily active users on its mobile app in the U.

S . grew only 12% in December, compared to 248% in November. Additionally, taking advantage of some of Bluessky's unique features takes at least some level of coding, which can be daunting to the average user.

It remains to be seen if users even want this level of customization. For the vast majority of users. They don't want to go in there and be tweaking this feature and that feature.

They just want to get off and running and frankly, be entertained, maybe educated about what's going what's going on in the world. How Bluesky will be monetized is another lingering question. I'll tell you what we're not going to do for monetization.

We're not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you and locking users in. That's not our model. And so what we are going to do is give users better experiences, add new features, and then we're doing a subscription model as well as services in the developer ecosystem.

Because this isn't just for users, this is for people who want to come build. Just two weeks later, Graber expanded upon Bluesky's position on ads during an interview with TechCrunch. Does that mean that advertisers can never be on Bluesky?

I don't think that's necessarily true, but I think that the ways that we would explore advertising if we did, would be much more user intent driven. For Bluesky, at some point they're going to have to introduce advertising. I think that's going to be key to just keeping the lights on and being competitive against the likes of X, and probably more so against Threads, which has all the weight of Meta behind it.

Experts say even if Bluesky did want to woo advertisers, the platform's decentralized architecture may make that tough. If you look at X, they lost a lot of advertisers because of the change in content moderation policies. Now, if you kind of take that over to Bluesky, where there's no set content moderation policy and it's set individually by each server, that becomes dicey for advertisers, right?

At the end of the day, you want a controlled brand experience for that ad or for that piece of sponsored content. And so there is a possibility to get a highly targeted and focused niche for your ads on Bluesky. But then there's also the flip side of not having that platform wide control over each server.

That might make brands think twice with their advertising spend. Bluesky has also struggled with an increase of impersonator accounts and scammers. In late November, the Bluesky team announced stricter rules around identity protection and impersonation.

The company also said it had quadrupled the size of its moderation team to deal with the backlog of moderation reports. While the future of Bluesky is still up in the air, experts say decentralized platforms like it are likely to bring about further fragmentation within the social media market. The differentiator for these platforms now isn't so much the features, but rather the atmosphere that they create within their apps.

What you might see with Bluesky is just kind of a reflection of society, where people who want that control, who want that independence, ownership, those kind of people might go to Bluesky people who just want some memes, might be going to Threads, and people who want to get in some real heated debates might be going to X. I think people will choose to go where their values align, where their interests align, where their people are.