X, formerly Twitter, is no longer the "digital town square" it once promised to be. Following the results of the U.S. presidential election, floods of users unhappy with the app's latest direction are moving over to a competing app, Bluesky.
Bluesky's decentralized social media platform has steadily grown from 9+ million users as of September to 14.6+ million as of Tuesday, with the latest surge taking place over the weekend as U.S. users fled X.
The exodus briefly made Bluesky the No. 2 iPhone app in the U.S. App Store on Monday, up from No. 27 the day after the elections. Today, it's dropped slightly to No. 3, behind Meta's Threads and ChatGPT.
The pace of new user sign-ups is also worth noting. Yesterday, multiple outlets reported Bluesky had gained more than 700,000 users over the past week, bringing its total to 14.5 million. One day later, it's over 14.6 million, indicating that roughly 100,000 users are joining daily.
According to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky's U.S. downloads have grown by 933% year-to-date, while X's have grown by 48%. Appfigures also noted that Bluesky's downloads on November 10th had increased by 624% compared over November 1st.
What's more, according to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, engagement on Bluesky tends to be higher than on X -- and that's not a recent trend. Though X still has the numbers because many users abandon but don't delete their X accounts, Bluesky tends to have a higher percentage of "posters" -- meaning those who actively engage instead of lurk -- Graber says.
"We...have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven't dipped below ~30% posters," she remarked in a Bluesky post on Tuesday. For newcomers, she recommends posting into relevant feeds, commenting on others' posts, seeking out your mutuals (those you follow who follow you in return), and using hashtags to increase engagement with your own content.
The shifts in user adoption follow the changes lon Musk has made since buying the company formerly known as Twitter in fall 2022. The Telsa and SpaceX exec originally promised to turn his $44 billion acquisition into a free-speech platform where everyone's voice would be heard. But Musk instead leveraged the app to promote right-wing views, campaign for Trump, and suspend accounts at a higher rate than before, according to X's own transparency report data.
Alhough Musk may have once thought Twitter favored the left, he hasn't retooled the app as a neutral platform. In fact, studies found that Musk's own right-leaning political posts appeared in X users' feeds even if users didn't follow him or engage with his content.
With his 204 million followers, the platform gives Musk incredible reach to promote his own political views and rally for Trump.
Of course, some worry that Bluesky itself will become a partisan platform if flooded by liberals leaving X. But the nature of how its platform has been built doesn't lend itself to becoming driven by its owner's political views. In addition to standard blocking and reporting features, Bluesky allows users to create their own algorithms and custom feeds and subscribe to their own moderation services to personalize the app to their liking. If Bluesky's app and moderation decisions don't meet your needs, people will be able to run the social software on their own servers, somewhat similar to the open source X competitor Mastodon (though Bluesky uses a different protocol, the AT protocol, instead of Mastodon and Threads' ActivityPub.)
Interest in Bluesky has been growing for some time, and not only because of its infrastructure and deisn. Bluesky benefitted from other surges before, including when X was banned in Brazil and when Threads was dealing with moderation issues, for instance. But this latest bump is an indication that more left-leaning users are deciding to be done with X. And without the combative, back-and-forth political chatter Twitter became known for, its future as the "global town square" becomes ever more uncertain.