Bluesky, the social platform, is recording a dizzying growth in the number of users, with 2.5 million new members in the last week alone, for a total that has now exceeded 16 million active users. This influx of new registrations comes as X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is losing popularity following the recent election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the announcement of changes to the terms of use that could complicate any legal challenges for the social network owned by Elon Musk.
The interest in Bluesky is part of a broader phenomenon involving other emerging platforms, candidates to replace X, which has seen a decline in reputation and number of users since Musk’s acquisition. “We are seeing record levels of activity across all forms of interaction: likes, new accounts, followers,” Bluesky said in a statement, expecting to welcome a million new subscribers in a single day. Several organizations and prominent public figures, such as the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the British newspaper The Guardian and former CNN host Don Lemon, have announced their abandonment of X. The platform has recently been criticized by disinformation experts for facilitated the spread of fake news in key states during elections, raising concerns about the integrity of online information.
On the day Trump’s victory was announced on November 6, SimilarWeb data. However, despite the record traffic, more than 115,000 users decided to deactivate their accounts on X, the highest number recorded since Musk’s acquisition. At the same time, the Bluesky site attracted around 1.2 million visitors on November 6th alone, surpassing even Threads, Meta’s platform, which attracted around 950,000 hits. Despite this, the Threads app remains more popular in terms of active users. According to Abraham Yousef, senior analyst at Sensor Tower, this rapid growth of Bluesky may have been favored by both controversial content and technical issues on X, pushing many users to look for alternatives.