X Rival Bluesky Gained Over 1 Million Users In One Week: Report

In the week after the US presidential election, X alternative Bluesky earned over a million new users, most of whom live in the US, Canada and Britain, according to a Bluesky spokesperson.

The influx of new users pushed Bluesky to a new milestone on Wednesday: The platform passed 15 million user token. A month ago, there was 12 million users. Bluesky was at the top of the list of free iPhone apps on Tuesday, ahead of Threads, ChatGPT and Google.

According to New York TimesBluesky is benefiting from X users leaving the platform because of its owner Elon Musk and the results of the US presidential election.

But Bluesky is no stranger to growth following changes to X. In October, it gained 1.2 million new users in two days after X announced that the block button would no longer block anyone from seeing public posts.

Meta's Threads also seem to be attracting more users; PASSED 175 million users in July and 275 million in November, the company says.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky started as one independent research project within the then-Twitter in 2019 to create an open standard for social media platforms so that apps can work between them.

It became its own company in 2022.

Bluesky adds a .bsky.social to the end of your user handle. So if your name is “example”, the @example.bsky.social username would be yours.

Who owns Bluesky?

Bluesky is mostly owned by CEO Jay Graber and the Bluesky team. The company's board consists of Jabber/XMPP inventor Jeremy Miller, Mike Masnick; AND Kinjal Shah.

What is the difference between Twitter and Bluesky?

Although Bluesky may look a lot like X, it gives users more choices. When you sign up, for example, you can choose to host your data with Bluesky or with a custom server of your own.

Bluesky users also have more control over what they see when they scroll. They can access resources created by other users such as Science, Art, and News.

The platform currently has no ads.

“We believe there must be better strategies to support social networks that don't require selling user data for advertising,” Bluesky wrote in a blog post in July 2023.

Another change: Bluesky's limit for posts it's 300 characters, which is slightly more than X's 280 characters for free users.

How does a Bluesky post look compared to an X post?

Here's what a recent post from Mark Cuban on Bluesky looks like:

Hello Less Hateful World

– Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 8:37 am

This is one of Cuban's last posts on X:

How to drive @X crazy users

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) November 12, 2024

Is Bluesky still invite only?

Bluesky was by invitation only until February when was opened to all. The platform amassed 3 million users when it was invitation-only, with 800,000 added on the first day of publication.

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