Bluesky, the public source alternative to Twitter, has experienced a notable uptick in its user base, just a day after it became available to the general public. The platform has added over 850,000 new users, pushing its overall membership to approximately 4 million. Until recently, the service had been in an exclusive testing phase for about 12 months where it had grown to barely over 3 million users before officially being opened to everyone. As per an internet tracker, the current total sign-ups are nearly 4.1 million. “We’re really getting things moving here,” posted Bluesky’s CEO, Jay Graber via X.
The influx of new users is suggestive of the lingering interest in the platform, which originally began in 2019 as an internal project at Twitter with the backing of Jack Dorsey. It also denotes that Meta still doesn’t dominate the market share for a text-based Twitter substitute. As announced last week, Meta’s Threads app recorded 130 million monthly users.
Graber has alluded to Bluesky’s intent to grow gradually so the platform, including the infrastructure it’s built on, can be developed without the pressures often caused by sudden increases in user growth. Over the past day, there were some technical issues due to a spike in activity, such as a brief overnight outage and trouble with the personalized feeds on the app, proving these concerns valid. The company claimed the outage issue was fixed within a few hours.
The long-term success of Bluesky will largely depend on whether it can retain its new growth and keep the interest of the newly signed-up users. Threads, too, initially experienced a sudden increase in new users that fell off before eventually bouncing back.
Though Bluesky might bear slight resemblance to Threads or X, it’s a fundamentally different platform, forming part of the emerging decentralized social media wave. The open-source protocol of Bluesky operates like a “permanently open” API, according to Graber, with dozens of developers independently creating their unique experiences using the platform. It also provides more customization options to the users, with features such as customized algorithms and the capability of setting your own content moderation rules.
