In the war for disaffected users of the platform once known as Twitter, Bluesky has had a great week. The decentralized social network has added at least 1 million users in about the past seven days. That growth is the latest point on a trend line: When Elon Musk either degrades X’s usability or makes news for one right-wing political maneuver or another, people look for an exit hatch from his platform. In October, Bluesky added 500,000 users in a day after Musk blunted X’s “block” feature. Bluesky also grew lots when Musk said (so far without following through) in September 2023 that his site would put up a paywall. It also got a big influx when Musk fought with Brazil’s supreme court in August.
Bluesky has not exactly won the Twitter Wars. By conventional metrics, it has not come close. The platform reports about 14.5 million total users. Meta’s Threads, which it built on the scaffolding of Instagram, reports 275 million in any given month. But the Twitter Wars are really a series of small border skirmishes, and Bluesky has momentum in a major battle: the one for news and live events.
Threads, like Musk’s X, is hostile to both news organizations and news as a concept. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri made clear from the moment of Threads’ launch in the fall of 2023 that the platform would not be friendly to news and politics. Meta has seen to that over the past year. It is seemingly impossible to get the Threads app to remain in a setting where a user only sees posts from accounts they choose to follow. External links do not travel well in the site’s algorithmic feeds. To the extent Threads is a home for “news,” it is because it is a nexus for the weirdest liberal election conspiracy theories out there. Threads is doing well with politically vapid influencers and people who understandably just want to try out an app that is connected to their Instagram account. It is a black hole for the exchange of news.
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What, then, is Bluesky? Until this week, one could think of it as a small, clean lifeboat, sitting off to the side of a sinking cruise ship where most of the passengers also have norovirus.
For more than a year, Bluesky has been the boat for left-leaning Twitter refugees who were so fed up with Musk that they beat the masses in deciding not to stick around on his platform. That could have some echo-chamber effects, not that such an outcome was any worse than being surrounded by the most obnoxious people on the internet over on X. (For example, a critical mass of Bluesky users were a good ways behind the rest of the internet last summer in recognizing that Joe Biden had no chance of political survival after his last debate performance.) X has remained where most of the action happens, because it is where politicians, companies, the biggest media outlets, and their reporters still live. The discourse has steadily degraded there, but the power users have not fled en masse.
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But while X has spiraled deeper into a racist fever dream and Threads has kept building its sunshine-pumping text app for influencers, Bluesky has been building. The site’s early adopters have built substantial communities there. They have sought to imbue the app with social norms, like encouraging users to post alt text with their pictures so that blind users can engage with them. They have even given Bluesky its own lore, a foundational piece for any social media site that hopes to be anything. (If you arrive on Bluesky this month, you will see posts about a sensual hog named Alf. It’s just part of the place.)
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The small team that runs Bluesky has loaded it up with features that aren’t just good but are a direct repudiation of things its competitors are bad at. Musk allows blocked users to see the posts of the person who blocked them? Here’s Bluesky with a feature known colloquially as “the nuclear block,” which makes any engagement impossible with a person who has declared they don’t want to speak to you. Threads forces an algorithmic scroll down your throat? Here’s Bluesky with no algorithmic feeds at all, just customizable timelines that people can opt into or curate themselves. Musk’s posts are inescapable on X, but I don’t know the name of Bluesky’s CEO, let alone see their posts all the time.
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Bluesky seems to remember something important about what once made Twitter successful: news and sports. Twitter knew well that these areas were its bread and butter. It introduced verification badges after a baseball manager sued the platform for helping someone impersonate him, and the result was a system that allowed users to easily check the authenticity of accounts. It became the public square for live sports, because it was the only place where people could exchange ooohs and aaahs and complaints about an offensive coordinator’s play-calling in real time on a Sunday afternoon. Twitter’s growth was supercharged when enough people realized that it was the place to be for everything from updates on a hurricane making landfall to chatter about a late-night Portland Trail Blazers game.
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Now, we return. Bluesky does not trap users in nonchronological feeds. It gives people only what they ask for, and it does so in real time. It turns out that when a lot of people join the fray, that creates a feeling of controlled but wholesome chaos that resembles what Twitter felt like to some of its earlier addicts around, say, 2014 or 2015. I have been on Bluesky for more than a year but cannot claim to have dived into it in earnest until this past weekend, when I found its college football–watching crowd to be much more energetic and fun than what I had seen this fall on X.
Eventually, more power users should migrate, in part because Bluesky does not throttle access to their work in the way that X, Meta, and Google have so frequently done. There are no bought-and-paid-for blue check marks that flood the zone. Bluesky doesn’t go out of its way to deprioritize posts with links. It encourages members of the news and sports media to spend time there and bring along their audiences. As the journalist Matt Pearce put it: “Hard to describe as a journalist how grateful I am to have a text-based app that does not suppress hyperlinks. I don’t know if people realize exactly how hostile the corporate internet has gotten toward news.” In building a social media site that does not go out of its way to be unusable for people distributing news or trying to consume it, Bluesky has been an innovator.
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The platform already works as a place where people enjoy spending time on the internet, with a more bespoke experience and less online sewage than they find on X. That will need to be its value proposition to win over more people in moments when Musk isn’t helping Donald Trump return to power or peeling away more features that once made Twitter popular. “Fight cryptofascism by leaving X” is a neat pitch, but one that would make most regular people stare at you with their mouths open.
Bluesky is winning a segment of the internet not because it is ideological but because it is customizable, allowing people to take more control of their experience online. It has not displaced X as a hub for the formation of elite public opinion, but it could dent Musk’s monopoly on that kind of discussion if enough power users, politicians, and companies eventually move. For now, it is a nice place to hang out with pals on the internet, get news without being confused, and take a quick break from thinking about Elon Musk.