What is Bluesky and why are millions of people joining it?
FILE – The app for Bluesky is shown on a mobile phone, left, and on a laptop screen on June 2, 2023, in New York.
Copyright AP Photo/Richard Drew, File
By Euronews with AP
Published on 18/11/2024 – 14:14 GMT+1
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The decentralised social media platform has seen a large uptick in users since the US election.
Millions of users have joined the social media platform Bluesky in the wake of the US presidential election.
Several academics, journalists, left-leaning politicians, and celebrities have said they would join the platform that used to be backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The platform said over the weekend that it was adding one million users in a day, with its total number of users now at 19 million.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky is a decentralised social media platform that was founded as a research initiative as part of Twitter in 2019.
In 2021, Jay Graber became CEO of the platform, with Dorsey leaving the platform’s board in May. The site was initially invitation-only but opened to the public in February.
It contains both a Discover feed, which Bluesky said last year is “customised for what you like to see, while still giving you a view into what’s trending in the network”. It also has a chronological feed for accounts that users follow.
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The platform has also added new features in the last year such as direct messaging and video sharing.
It is built on the AT Protocol, an open network for building social apps.
“Bluesky is an open social network that gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience,” the platform says on its social page.
New members as some flee X
The uptick for Bluesky comes as several X (formerly Twitter) users have said they’re leaving the platform.
Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022 and made several changes to how it moderates content, for instance.
He was also a vocal supporter of US President-elect Donald Trump during the 2024 US presidential election, posting about the vote extensively on X.
A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) ahead of the election found that Musk’s false or misleading claims on the platform had gathered nearly two billion views.
The billionaire has now been tapped by Trump to form a new government efficiency office.
Newspapers such as The Guardian in the UK and La Vanguardia in Spain announced after the US presidential election that they would leave Musk’s platform, with The Guardian saying it was due to “the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform”.
Other users on X said that they would not leave the platform but rather were adding accounts on Bluesky as millions joined its competitor.
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Former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, meanwhile, posted that it’s “a mistake for progressives to leave X”.
“Yes it has taken a rightward and toxic turn under Elon Musk, but there is no place comparable for discussion of the world’s most important developments. Fleeing X abandons this influential forum to the far right,” he wrote.
Previous uptick in Bluesky users
The post-election uptick in users isn’t the first time Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X.
The platform gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August with 85 per cent of them from Brazil, the company said.
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About 500,000 new users signed up in one day in October when X signalled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.
Despite Bluesky’s growth, X posted after the election that it had “dominated the global conversation on the US election” and had set new records.
