X rival Bluesky gains 7 lakh new users in a week after the US elections

Bluesky

Social media platform Bluesky, which has a user interface similar to X (formerly known as Twitter), has seen a huge influx of users since the United States election verdict. The surge is largely due to users looking for a better social media platform from misinformation and offensive content on X.

Bluesky now has 14.5 million global users

According to a report by The Verge, with 700,000 new users in the past week, Bluesky now has 14.5 million total accounts, up from nine million in September. Social media researcher Axel Bruns has attributed this rise to better content management, as Bluesky provides a good system for blocking/suspending problematic accounts and users policing harmful behaviour when compared to X.

Moreover, Elon Musk has spent the last several months pushing Trump’s views to his followers on X and has posted multiple posts on the platform in the past week to celebrate Trump’s presidency. However, Bluesky has benefited the most after users have switched sides from dissatisfaction with X and its billionaire owner.

Additionally, the majority of Bluesky’s new users are from North America and the UK. In contrast, after its rebranding to X, Twitter has lost millions of users and witnessed over one-fifth US drop in usage in seven months. However, the Instagram-bootstrapped Threads, which recently crossed 275 million monthly users, still has a significantly larger user base than Bluesky and is the top-rated app in Apple’s App Store.

Bluesky has also added new features, such as direct messaging and video compatibility, to better compete with X and make it look similar to it.