Bluesky has more than 21 million users. Where does it go from here?

Bluesky may look like X. It might share a co-founder with X. And as some people flock to the platform amid changes to X, the comparisons to the platform formerly known as Twitter are perhaps inevitable.

But Bluesky doesn’t want to be seen as an alternative to X at all, and instead has bigger ambitions, Rose Wang, COO of Bluesky, told us.

“We’re not positioning ourselves against X,” she said. “We’re positioning ourselves as the new social web.”

Bluesky certainly seems to have benefitted from X’s woes and missteps. When Brazil temporarily banned X after it refused to remove accounts accused of spreading misinformation about the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, Bluesky saw 4 million sign-ups, Wang said. When X changed its policy to allow users blocked by someone to still be able to see their posts, she said it saw another surge.

And now, following the US presidential election in which X owner Elon Musk was heavily involved, Bluesky has surpassed 21 million users worldwide, with 1 million sign-ups per day in the last week alone.

“There’s a lot of hunger to have a place to have global conversation that isn’t a partisan platform, and that’s there’s basically not many places that serve that need anymore,” Wang said. “We’re fulfilling that need.”

Amid that growth, Bluesky, which became open to the public in February and has just 20 full-time employees, is planning to capitalize on its momentum and aiming to change how social media companies do business.

A “democratic republic”-type platform

Social media business models have traditionally depended on users joining and staying within its defined platforms and engaging with the content the platform chooses to promote.

Wang said Bluesky’s ambition is to be a “democratic republic”-type platform, with an open-source code and the option for users to take follower lists and data with them if they leave. She compared the platform to the early days of the internet, saying it’s more like the open web instead of early walled gardens like AOL.

By giving users control over their data, Bluesky is intentionally opting out of the more traditional means of profitmaking for a social media platform—that is, selling that data to advertisers. To date, the company has relied on venture funding, and last month, pulled in $15 million in a Series A round.

To help bolster that funding, Wang said the company will release paid subscription offerings later this year, including features like higher-quality video uploads and custom avatar frames. “Core functionality” features won’t go to subscriber-only tiers, she said, adding that the company “would never put speech behind a paywall.”

Bluesky is also considering a payments system that could serve as an alternative to content monetization platforms like Patreon. If Bluesky were to go that route, the company could then take a cut of transaction fees, Wang said.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has previously said the company won’t “enshittify” its platform with ads, and Wang said that if the platform were to become overrun with branded content, it would only be an incentive for people to leave. But she didn’t rule out advertising entirely.

“If we ever were to do ads, it would look a lot more like how ads work on the web, where it’s intent-based,” she said. “There are ways to do ads that are interesting and are not intrusive, but until we figure out what that model looks like, we’re not going to touch it.”

While there may not be advertising options yet, Wang said Bluesky won’t prevent brands from joining the platform.

“We are very clear that our primary user is the end user that we’re serving, and so we’re building features for them, ” Wang said. “If brands come, great, but you should be authentic; that’s what we tell them. It’s not going to work if you try to sound like a brand.”

Text posts, but make it less toxic

To date, Bluesky has spent nothing on marketing and has only recently started exploring earned media to get the word out. User growth to date has happened organically, Wang said, including the arrival of high-profile users, whom she said joined without any outreach or incentives.

Wang said Bluesky is looking to reach users across the political spectrum and around the world and will emphasize that the platform is a place for “thoughtful conversation, no matter what you believe.” Nearly a third of the platform’s users post on Bluesky, compared to about 1% on X, she told us, and some have already noted that Bluesky feels like the early days of Twitter—with some even complaining that it’s too wholesome.

“The best marketing strategy is speaking to what people care about and what they’re experiencing,” Wang said. “What we keep hearing is that people are making friends again.”

Like with X, Wang is also not focused much on Threads, even though the Meta platform has 275 million users and is competing with Bluesky for the top spot on Apple’s App Store charts.

“We’re just doing our own thing,” she said, adding that “if anything, we heard that Threads is trying to do what we’re doing”—referencing a recent announcement from Meta that the company will soon offer customizable feeds. (After we spoke to Wang, Threads made another announcement that it would de-emphasize recommended posts and would share more posts from accounts that users have opted to follow.)

Having “[blown] through a lot of our user milestones,” Wang said her team is focused on getting subscriptions live and developing the next iteration of features, like bringing feed customizations to the app and allowing users to build their own websites using their Bluesky domains.

“We want to go back to a world [online] that is co-created by all,” she said.

Before all that happens, though, there are smaller fish to fry. “We know people want bookmarks,” she said. “So that needs to come.”