Bluesky soars to 18.3 million users, but faces challenges in rivaling X: Report

Bluesky, the newly rising competitor of Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter), recently hit 18.3 million registered users, shooting to the top of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, Business Insider reported.

It is, however, playing catchup with X by using nostalgia and a simpler format. By reminding users of how Twitter once used to be.

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Though it is nowhere close to X’s 259 million active daily users and Threads’ 275 million monthly active users, those who are on the platform have been praising its similarity to “old Twitter,” complete with a reverse chronological timeline, less hate speech and misinformation, and more control over what content is shown in your feed, according to the report.

Bluesky’s daily users have increased more than 119% since the US elections, with Threads growing its user base by 8% and X staying mostly flat, according to the report, which cited research by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

The report cited Jonathan Bellack, the director of Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab as saying that much of the new pull toward Bluesky is because it finally tapped into the “network effect.”

This is when enough people seem to have joined the site to reach a point where users don’t feel they are missing out on content on other platforms or losing their online community by switching.

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A famous example would be billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban making it his new primary social media platform.

“The variety of content and engagement is improving daily,” the report quoted Cuban as saying. “The different verticals are filling out as sources of news and information as well.”

Most notably, Jack Dorsey who founded Twitter is also the founder of Bluesky. It was founded in 2019 as a research initiative at Twitter itself in a move to explore decentralizing the platform.

However, Dorsey also said in May that he decided to leave Bluesky since it was becoming too much like Twitter and was “literally repeating all the mistakes” Twitter made, regarding content moderation.

Moreover, it has another issue: not everyone is switching as similarities to pre-Musk Twitter aren’t a selling point.

Yet another big challenge is that advertisers, in general, are still noticeably absent. This applies to Threads too.

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