Bluesky: the social media platform causing a mass X-odus

The social media platform Bluesky has acquired more than one million new users since the US election, said a company spokesperson.

This influx of new members, largely from the US and UK, has been put down to users seeking to "escape misinformation and offensive posts on X", said The Guardian.

Why are people leaving X?

Users of X, which Elon Musk bought for $44 billion (£34 billion) in 2022, have increasingly complained of "more misinformation" and "offensive posts" since he took over, said Sky News.

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The latest "big new change" concerns the blocking feature, said Forbes. From now on, blocked users will still be able to see users' posts, but "simply not be able to interact with them", a move positioned as "some sort of 'freedom of speech' thing".

But the move "essentially accomplishes nothing" except "making it easier to enable harassment or annoyance from users that have been blocked" and people who are "frequently blocked, often for good reason", are the only ones who "directly benefit from this".

In August, as riots and unrest blew up in towns and cities across the UK, Bluesky said it registered a 60% increase in activity from users in the UK after Musk used X to criticise Keir Starmer. There was also a surge after X was suspended in Brazil, when Bluesky said it gained three million extra users.

Taylor Swift fans have been moving from X to Bluesky in protest at Musk's support of Donald Trump and the "rhetoric that has erupted on the platform" following Trump's win, said Wired. Although there are Swift fans on "all sides of the political spectrum", the community "prides itself on being a positive and accepting space".

For many, X had become the very opposite of that. "You were getting this awful timeline of far-right, white supremacist, conspiracy theory posts", Shannon C McGregor, an associate professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, told The New York Times, something "the great majority of people don’t want to interact with on a daily basis".

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky originally emerged as part of Twitter in 2019, but it became an independent platform when it officially launched in 2021. Owned by Jay Graber, its CEO since 2021, it takes a "decentralised approach to social media", where "different platforms and communities can inter-operate" rather than all live under one corporate banner like Twitter or Facebook, said Sky News.

What is different on Bluesky?

"I have noticed something really interesting there", said Forbes. There is "no elaborate algorithm that hides your posts from followers consistently" and there are "more engaged users who frequent the site more than Twitter because, well, Twitter is bad now".

Many of the accounts created on Bluesky this week are "left-leaning", said The New York Times, and they "shared cat videos alongside their hopes" that this platform "might offer a reprieve from the misinformation and hateful speech" that have "swirled on X" since Musk took over.

Can Bluesky overtake X?

Bluesky has "become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide", social media researcher Axel Bruns told The Guardian, without the "far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else".

The company "appears to be courting users" who are concerned about the "ramifications" of Musk's "proximity" to Trump, said The New York Times. Following reports that Musk would spend election night with Trump, Bluesky’s account posted a message on X saying it could "guarantee that no Bluesky team members will be sitting with a presidential candidate tonight" and "giving them direct access to control what you see online".

But Bluesky's new high of 14.7 million users is "still far fewer than Threads", Meta's competitor to X, which has reported that it had reached 275 million monthly active users, noted the broadsheet.