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It’s been just over two years since Elon Musk bought Twitter, and as the platform has grown more bot-heavy and right-leaning in the time since, platforms like Mastodon and Threads have emerged as alternative places to post.
Now, it seems, Bluesky is having a moment.
Since the election, the platform—which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey helped start in 2019 before leaving the board last year—has gained more than a million new users, surpassing 15 million users total.
The shift comes as rumors of Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration became official and after he spent millions supporting the former president during his most recent campaign and used X as an increasingly pro-MAGA platform in the lead-up to the election.
High-profile users who have emerged (or re-emerged) on the platform in the last week include New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, author John Green, and billionaire Mark Cuban, with Cuban posting “Hello Less Hateful World” to mark his entrance. Some new entrants have compared the site to the early days of Twitter.
Exit, stage left: Calls continue to grow for users to quit X over a policy change going into effect today that will allow the platform to use all user data to train its AI model, and amid a high-profile prediction of a possible Truth Social merger.
It’s not just individual posters that are heading out. The Guardian announced Wednesday that it would no longer be using X, calling it “a toxic media platform” and noting Musk’s ability to use it to “shape political discourse.” Fellow news outlets PBS and NPR have also left the platform since Musk took over, as have many of the platform’s top advertisers.
Marketing insights and analytics company Kantar reported last month that 26% of marketers plan to cut back spending on X in 2025; the company continues to lose ad dollars year over year.
Threat of Threads? While Bluesky has surpassed Threads to become the No. 1 free app on Apple’s App Store this week, Threads continues to lead in overall usage, with 275 million monthly active users as of earlier this month, according to a post from Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram. This week, Mosseri announced that Threads has seen 15 million sign-ups so far in November alone.
To date, no text-based social platform has offered similar advertising opportunities for brands fleeing X. However, on Wednesday, The Information reported that Meta will begin allowing a small number of advertisers to create and publish ads on Threads as of January.
Will Bluesky follow? CEO Jay Graber said in February that she would not “enshittify the network with ads,” but only time will tell.
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