AStrangeName
Member of Snitch Syndication
Looks like it's time for Twitter to join Facebook in the 
section
section
Bluesky signups up 60%
- Thread starter Scustin Bieburr
- Start date
O.T.I.S.
Veteran
Bluesky should go recruit some of the staff
Bigblackted4
Superstar
thanksUse this extension as it'll help you on finding them
GitHub - kawamataryo/sky-follower-bridge: Instantly find and follow the same users from your X(Twitter) follower on Bluesky.
Instantly find and follow the same users from your X(Twitter) follower on Bluesky. - kawamataryo/sky-follower-bridgegithub.com
BK The Great
Veteran
Crazy Legs Rock Steady Crew (@crazylegsbx) on Threads
Elon Musk is at it again. Bye Twitter / X or whatever the hell you are. #twitterdeactivated
www.threads.net
MustafaSTL
Achievement In Every Field of Human Endeavor
Would love for this or Threads to take over. Like I said about Threads, the only thing missing will be major accounts stop using/posting on twitter and only post on Threads or Bluesky. It’s risky for them because they’re trusting all their followers will migrate over with them after building a brand and following on twitter for years.
MurderToCassette
Sa Da Tay
Joined the other day polosportbear.bsky.social
Any of my fellow producers/beatmakers on here yet?
Any of my fellow producers/beatmakers on here yet?
Give it time. But I truly think more corporations, sports teams, bands/musicians and celebs will make the switch and once they do and people begin to follow it's game over. Just deleted my 2 Twitter accounts. Found all the people I want to follow. As long as I can still get up-to-date news and it's not filled with lies or racism/right wing propaganda and terrible ads every few posts I see this being much better.
MustafaSTL
Achievement In Every Field of Human Endeavor
Yeah I only still have my twitter account to get my instant sports and news updates. If Shams and other news breakers quit twitter cold turkey and posted only on Threads or Bluesky, it would be wonderful and I wouldn’t have a need for Twitter. It’s hard for them to build that brand and following elsewhere when they still use twitter first for instant news.
I just add my choices through the News section in Feeds. It has the usual suspects right now haven’t gone too deep yet.
Liberals are fleeing X again — this time for Bluesky
An upstart social network attracts news junkies and politicos from larger rivals.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is one of a number of liberal figures posting on the social media platform Bluesky since Donald Trump won the election with the support of X owner Elon Musk. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Will Oremus
November 14, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Elon Musk’s X drew more web traffic on the day Donald Trump won the presidential election than on any other day so far this year, the analytics firm Similarweb estimates. It also broke its 2024 record for users lost in a single day.
With Musk taking on a central advisory role to Trump’s administration after leveraging X and his personal fortune to boost Trump’s campaign, U.S. liberals and others disenchanted with the site are once again scurrying to friendlier pastures. This time, though, the primary beneficiary may not be Meta’s Threads, which is controlled by Musk’s fellow billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and has acquired 275 million users in just over a year, many of them X refugees.
Instead, the upstart social network Bluesky is surging. It has more than doubled in size in the past three months. And in the eight days since the election, it has added more than 1.25 million users, bringing its total to more than 15 million as it topped Apple’s App Store rankings on Wednesday. Of those, some 8.5 million have logged in within the past month, spokesperson Emily Liu said Wednesday.
That leaves Bluesky at least one order of magnitude short of X and Threads, each of which boast hundreds of millions of users. In a post on Wednesday, X chief executive Linda Yaccarino said, “X usage is at an all-time high and continues to surge,” adding that users “of every interest, political party and point of view” would always have a place there.
Meta, which launched Threads in July 2023 as an offshoot of Instagram to capitalize on X’s stumbles under Musk, did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The public embrace of Bluesky in recent days by a slew of influential political and media figures has given the site a shot in the arm and promoted it as a contender to become the left’s answer to Musk’s increasingly rightward-tilting X — a mantle Threads has resisted by downplaying hard news and political content. Zuckerberg’s recent overtures toward Trump have also dampened its appeal among some liberals.
The luminaries leaning into Bluesky include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who resumed posting there Monday after more than a year of inactivity; former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who announced on Wednesday that he was leaving X and joining Bluesky; and MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who touted Bluesky on his show Tuesday evening.
Follow me on BlueskyDon Lemon (@donlemonofficial.bsky.social)
— Don Lemon (@donlemon) November 13, 2024
Reached via direct message on Bluesky, Ocasio-Cortez said she views the site as “far more independent from the large corporations and billionaires who are vying to own or manipulate every digital platform or algorithm they can get their hands on right now.”
“It feels like it’s a platform for and by real people,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “The usability, community, and relative lack of harassment here allow me to be a lot more candid about my work and talk out events and decisions in real time with actual people.”
Lemon, who is suing Elon Musk after a deal to post videos exclusively on X fell through, said in a goodbye video that he decided to leave X after reading The Washington Post’s reporting on its upcoming terms of service changes, which include a clause that funnels lawsuits against the company to a conservative judicial district in Texas.
The Guardian, the U.K.-based newspaper, also said Wednesday that it would no longer post on X, though it hasn’t joined Bluesky.
Bluesky was originally backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who in 2019 announced his intention to fund a new, “decentralized” form of social media not controlled by any one company. He tapped technologist Jay Graber to lead the project, which launched as an invite-only app in February 2023 and opened to the public a year later.
But as Bluesky grew, Dorsey got frustrated with its speech policies and left the company’s board earlier this year. Liu, the Bluesky spokesperson, said Dorsey no longer owns any part of the company and has cut ties entirely, leaving the 33-year-old Graber and other Bluesky employees as the majority owners. The company raised $15 million from venture investors in October, making it a financial minnow compared with X and Meta in the pool of real-time, text-based social apps.
While estimates of app downloads and usage are imprecise, data from analytics companies suggest Bluesky’s user base remains a niche for now, with X still the largest app in its category and Threads steadily gaining. But in the growth-driven world of social media, sudden shifts in momentum command attention.
Appfigures, which tracks mobile app downloads, estimates that Bluesky has been downloaded just 8 million times on Apple’s and Google’s app stores in 2024, compared with 105 million for X and 260 million for Threads, which Meta has promoted via Instagram. But Bluesky is growing much faster relative to its size, and its growth has accelerated since the election, while average daily downloads of Threads have slowed by 6 percent.
Similarweb estimates that X drew 46.5 million U.S. visitors to its website on Nov. 6, the day after the election — 38 percent more than its recent daily average. But it also had 115,000 visits to a page that X users see when deactivating their accounts. That’s the “single biggest day for account exits we’ve seen,” Similarweb spokesperson David Carr said. Meanwhile, Bluesky saw a “big increase in web traffic” during and immediately after the election, at least temporarily surpassing that of Threads.
At first glance, Bluesky resembles Twitter from an earlier era, showing users a chronological feed of short posts from people they follow. But it offers some distinctive features.
Those include the ability for users to create and choose among different types of algorithmic or handcrafted feeds; build and share “starter packs” of users to follow on a given theme; and customize their content moderation settings. Perhaps more importantly for left-leaning or anti-Trump users fleeing X for friendlier turf, it has a freewheeling vibe that is distinctly liberal, including a vocal community of transgender users who have been known to gang up on users whose views they deem transphobic.
That has led some commentators to criticize Bluesky as an “echo chamber.” Others contend it is more welcoming and humane than X, not only for transgender people but for women and people of color. ESPN football reporter Mina Kimes, who joined the site this week, expressed surprise and gratitude at the experience of “looking at the replies on an app and not seeing porn bots or people calling me DEI.”
Threads, which avoids recommending accounts or posts that focus on political and social issues, has emerged since its July 2023 launch as X’s largest competitor, attracting mainstream audiences with the promise of content from sports, entertainment and pop culture influencers. But it has also alienated some of the politicos and news junkies who made X a hub for online discourse and activism.
Threads’ “lack of a clear identity and insistence on not promoting news and politics makes it difficult to follow events in real-time, which remains one of X’s selling points,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer, a market research firm. She said that while both Threads and Bluesky may continue to gain ground on X, “keeping those apps safe and welcoming will be more difficult as they scale.”
“More broadly, these shifts indicate a polarization of the social landscape,” Enberg added. “Social media usage is already highly fragmented, and as more left-leaning users leave X, that will create deeper political divides between the platforms.”
Neither Threads nor Bluesky has ads at this point, though tech blog the Information reported Wednesday that Meta is aiming to launch ads in Threads early next year. Bluesky, which has little revenue so far, has said it is exploring a subscription model for features like higher-quality video uploads or profile customizations but has no plans to sell ads or charge for its basic service. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation.
X, meanwhile, has seen advertisers flee since Musk bought it, though the Financial Times reported on Wednesday that some are eyeing a return as they court the favor of Musk and Trump.
Matt Navarra, a social media consultant, said he recently rejoined Bluesky after posting mainly on Threads in recent months. “There’s more personality, there’s more characters, there’s a bit more fun to be had there,” he said.
from @natalie.sh! data sourced from @jaz.bsky.social's bsky stats.very inspired by @theo.io's user counter.
Bluesky (@bsky.app)
we're 10k people away from reaching 1,000,000 new users in a single day.... help us find 10,000 of our closest friends? as a treat? text a friend this link: bsky.app/download
bsky.app
1/1
@Bluesky
we're 10k people away from reaching 1,000,000 new users in a single day....
help us find 10,000 of our closest friends? as a treat?
text a friend this link: bsky.app/download
@Bluesky
we're 10k people away from reaching 1,000,000 new users in a single day....
help us find 10,000 of our closest friends? as a treat?
text a friend this link: bsky.app/download
