The mainstream desperately wants Bluesky to ‘happen’, for it to become the next big thing in social media. As such, many disgusted with X, formerly Twitter, and the results of this past election are flocking to the new shiny app to create a new platform for themselves and their crowd.
While it’s gained a big jump in users since November, analysts and onlookers aren’t optimistic about this surge, and they have good reason to be cautious. For one thing, these gains are short-term and mirror the rise of similar Twitter alternatives over the last few years.
We’ve seen Tribul and Hive come and go. Vero and Mastodon are still around, but they don’t have the user base or reach to be any kind of serious threat. Zack Snyder and Ray Fisher are the most prominent names to give the former a whirl, and to date, are among a select few famous individuals to make Vero a home for fan interaction.
Still, because X is “toxic” and owned by Elon Musk, a Trump ally, the list of celebs fleeing to Bluesky has grown by leaps and bounds. Mark Cuban, Stephen King, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Stiller, Alex Winter of Bill & Ted fame, Guillermo Del Toro, Matthew Lillard, Alyssa Milano, Barbra Streisand, and Mark Hamill have all either made the jump or added Bluesky to their social repertoire.
George Takei is also feathering his nest at the Twitter-like site, which is often compared to the look, feel, and climate of Twitter circa 2017. He was one of the first to try Bluesky and he has been there a while longer than anyone mentioned above. However, like Hamill and a few others, Takei has not deleted his X account although he does urge his followers to migrate over to Bluesky.
Director Rob Reiner tried setting up shop there too, but quickly came down with a case of buyers remorse so bad that he needed a ‘spa day’ to recuperate. “This platform is vile, racist and evil,” Reiner initially posted according to The Daily Wire. “It did not take long for MAGA scum to come spread their lies.”
“I have made the decision to take the next few days to check into a facility for peace and relaxation,” he added in a follow-up post. “No phones, social media, no trolls, just calmness to heal my pain.” While he garnered mockery for this, Reiner kept his word and suspended both his X and Bluesky profiles.
X might also have taken a hit, but unlike Reiner, the site is not feeling it. According to Sensor Tower via Forbes, X’s number of daily active users shrunk by only 27 percent in two years while its user base still grew by 17 percent since 2023. A record 46 million people “flocked to X” in 2024 whereas just over “115,000 U.S. internet-based X users killed their accounts the day after the election.”
Election Day was great for X’s traffic too as “average time spent on the platform increased 32%” around that period in November. Bluesky’s user numbers and traffic went up and into the millions, which is being used as a cause for celebration among its supporters, but the platform has a lot of catching up to do before it can be certified an overnight success.
The X-Twitter is far from the only game in town when a few services are vying for a piece of the pie. This includes Threads, Meta’s text-based extension of the already proven and wildly popular Instagram. Threads boasts a reported 275M users monthly and crossed that threshold last month, says Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
Bluesky has around 20M users and counting, which may include people who sign up but don’t post anything or use the app regularly. They are also experiencing a bump in the past year because they got rid of the invite-only means of entry. The platform is nowhere near ”breathing down Threads’ neck” as Social Media Today eloquently put it.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s old pet project is a distant third that can barely be considered solid despite the steam it’s gaining. For all the effort and momentum, Mosseri shrugs off Bluesky’s progress. “There is no way this is the case as we have many times as many daily users as they have total signups,” he said in a reply to data shared on his home turf. “Maybe this data is web data?”
Objectively, Bluesky is trending upward, but its ability to capitalize on that will depend on the level of influence celebrities and tech journalists extolling the platform actually have when most of us aren’t buying what they’re selling anymore.
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