Bluesky is gaining 700,000 new users per week following the U.S. elections

The social media platform Bluesky, which offers similar features to X (formerly Twitter), gained over 700,000 new users, primarily from North America and the UK, in the week following the U.S. elections, as users sought an alternative to misinformation and offensive posts on X, according to the Guardian. This growth brought Bluesky’s global user base to 14.5 million, up from 9 million in September, while X now exceeds 600 million monthly active users projected for 2024.

Bluesky has previously gained from user dissatisfaction with X and its owner, Elon Musk, who acquired the platform in 2022 and is closely associated with the election campaign of U.S. President Donald Trump. After the rebranding to X, Twitter lost millions of users, with U.S. usage dropping by over one-fifth in the subsequent seven months.

Bluesky began as a project within Twitter but became an independent company in 2022 and is now primarily owned by its CEO, J. Graber.

Bluesky reported gaining 3 million new users in the week after X was suspended in Brazil in September and an additional 1.2 million users in the two days following X’s announcement that it would allow users to view posts from those who had blocked them.

Despite this growth, Bluesky remains in second place in the social media category on the U.S. app store, behind Threads, which reached 275 million active users in November, up from 200 million in August. Threads, another alternative to X, introduced a policy earlier this year to avoid promoting political content—a substantial portion of the material typically shared on platforms like X.