Bluesky reaches 15 million users as more people look for alternatives to X

1 week ago 9

Bluesky, one of the many microblogging platforms, has now officially reached the milestone of 15 million registered users. A month ago, Bluesky still had 13 million followers, which shows that the social network is growing rapidly as more people look for alternatives to X.

Bluesky continues to grow, but is still far behind its competitors

The figure was first shared by Stats for Bluesky, a website that uses the platform’s API to obtain statistics about the social network (via The Verge). According to the website, there are now more than 15.2 million registered users on Bluesky. For comparison, Bluesky had just 2 million users in November 2023.

Bluesky is still far behind the competition, especially X, which has more than 500 million active users worldwide. Meta’s Threads is also more popular, with 275 million monthly active users and growing at a rate of over a million sign-ups a day. Even so, Bluesky is attracting more and more attention from users who are unhappy with both X and Threads.

A recent episode in Brazil that resulted in the temporary banning of X led hundreds of thousands of Brazilians to try Bluesky. More recently, Elon Musk’s political involvement with Donald Trump has also motivated more people to look for alternatives to X. Bluesky’s app is now the most downloaded in the US App Store, with Threads following close behind.

Bluesky emerged in 2021 as a “proof of concept” for the decentralized AT Protocol. In 2019, Twitter’s then CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the company would fund the initiative that would result in Bluesky. The platform no longer has a relationship with X and they ended up becoming competitors after Elon Musk bought Twitter.

A few weeks ago, Bluesky announced its plans to introduce a paid subscription with extra features, similar to X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue). The platform assures that it won’t put the social network behind a paywall.