Bluesky, the emerging social network of 2024 that seeks to rival X. What challenges await you in 2025?

“To the extent that there is a need on the part of certain communities to express ideas, the appearance of social networks aligned with the thoughts of the writer will begin. It happened with Donald Trump, who when he was expelled from Twitter created his own network, Truth Social,” says Erick Iriarte, a lawyer specializing in digital law, in dialogue with The Commerce. “Bluesky is an alternative that came from Twitter whose argument is to return to the origins of the microblogging service, which was conceived as a free-to-use tool without a specific trend, so with a more libertarian vision contrary to what X currently has ”.

What is Bluesky?

It is a migration between platforms that makes sense, since Bluesky was born in 2019 as an initiative of the then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, in search of further decentralizing the platform, giving its users more control over their information and experience similar to what its rival Mastodon experienced in 2016.

But incompatibilities between the company’s business model and the research group’s proposals led to Bluesky becoming independent in February 2022, reconfiguring itself as a public benefit corporation (CBP), a type of company that not only has to ensure the pecuniary interests of its owners, employees and customers, but also the public good. It was a timely division, because it saved the social network from the beginning of the acquisition process by Elon Musk that culminated in it being renamed X.

With legal and financial ties severed with the acquisition of Twitter, Bluesky continued its gestation period, spending all of 2023 in a Beta version to finally open its doors publicly on February 6 of this year, attracting moderate attention mainly due to the participation of Dorsey in his creation. Although it should be noted that the participation of the former CEO of Twitter ended in May 2024, when he stopped being part of the company’s board of directors, accusing it of “repeating the same mistakes” as X.

Explosive growth

Bluesky’s growth began more modestly, exiting its beta with around five million users, a number that increased moderately over the following months. Proof of this is that it only crossed the six million threshold in July.

In an ironic twist, Bluesky’s main promoter is the one who must be considered his biggest rival, with moves by X and its owner Elon Musk causing significant jumps in the number of users of the brand new social network.

Thus, in August Reuters reported a 60% increase in activity on Bluesky in the United Kingdom, after Musk shared provocative messages regarding unrest in that country, including stating that a civil war was “inevitable.”

At the end of the same month Bluesky saw an increase of one million users in a couple of days, after legal problems between the Brazilian Judiciary and X ended with the social network banned in the country. And although access to reach such a milestone.

Added to this were X’s criticized measures during the year, which included adding without prior announcement a clause in the terms of service that allowed them to use the content and information of their users to train their artificial intelligence AI Grok, as well as a controversial change in its blocking policy in which it stopped hiding from users the publications of accounts that had previously blocked them, both decisions that caused the anger of some ‘tweeters’.

But ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ occurred in the US presidential elections in November, when the strong support that Musk gave to Donald Trump caused hundreds of thousands of users to end up closing their accounts on knew of the victory of the Republican candidate. It was a significant exodus, with around 2.5 million users joining Bluesky just a week before the election partyand perhaps more important, was the acceleration of the growth of this platform, going from 16 million users in mid-November to nearly 26 million on the eve of the new year.

Clouds on the horizon?

But explosive growth is not safe from problems nor does it guarantee a sustainable increase, with Erick Iriarte noting that Threads, Facebook’s microblogging social network, also experienced rapid growth that ended up not affecting X’s numbers.

“Experiments like Bluesky are interesting exercises and serve a certain community, but in the end users return to networks that are stable, useful and practical,” he warns. “When you delve into the global numbers, you find that all users are located in the United States or in specific places.”

This last claim is supported by the data, with the firm Semrush determining that the majority of traffic to the Bluesky page comes from the US (52.3%), the United Kingdom (8.3%), Japan (6, 6%), Brazil (5.4%) and Canada (3.1%).

The sustainability of the social network is not the only problem that afflicts Bluesky, which with the increase in users has also seen the emergence of malicious actors such as identity theft and botnets that try to plant disinformation and influence public opinion. Problems that Bluesky has tried to address by increasing its moderation teams from 25 to 100, according to Euronews – and implementing new impersonation detection systems.

But its main problem probably continues to be X, which despite its setbacks continues to maintain a great numerical advantage with around 335 million active userss, according to Statista data.

“In the end, technology is neither good nor bad, it depends on its user, whether the person who created the tool or the one who uses it,” considers Iriarte. In this regard, the president of the Ethics Court of the Peruvian Press Council also remembers what happened on the old Twitter, where at one point you had more people with a speech along a certain line that ended up expelling Trump, so that these Then they were displaced with the rise to power of Elon Musk. “The organization changes, Trump returns, and the users of the previous line now want to leave. But those who remain in the middle, who are the opinion leaders – including the press – as well as those who take opinion or are formed by it, do not leave this tool because they know that they must stay where the party is.”