Here's how Bluesky, alternative to X is handling explosive growth

By Mike Isaac 

In February 2023, a half-dozen techies introduced a social network prototype in an invitation-only launch. They deliberately debuted their creation, Bluesky, with little fanfare so that they could closely manage its growth.

 

But lately, it has been anything but slow and steady.

 

Over the past week, Bluesky’s growth has exploded, more than doubling to 15 million-plus users as people seek alternatives to X, Facebook and Threads. It has rocketed to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores as the most downloaded free app. Its ascent has been so rapid that the company has been forced to grow up practically overnight.

 

 

Bluesky’s 20 full-time employees have been working around the clock to deal with the issues that come with hyper-growth: site outages, glitches in the code and content moderation issues. Most importantly, they have been trying to keep early users happy as new members have flooded in.

 

“We as a team take pride in our ability to scale quickly,” Jay Graber, 33, the chief executive of Bluesky, said in an interview. “But there’s always some growing pains.” She added that the app, which is still dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram and X, was adding more than a million new users a day. Bluesky is surging amid upheaval in the social media world. After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he morphed it into X, changing many of its functions and alienating some of its most loyal users. Threads, an app similar to X that Meta introduced last year, relies mostly on an opaque algorithmic curation that reduces politics from people’s feeds. That has caused some people to head to other networks, including Bluesky, to discuss hot-button social issues.

 

From its beginning, Bluesky aimed to separate itself from other social media. The project grew out of an idea from Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, who said he hoped to build a “decentralised” social network. That meant building the app with an “open protocol,” which keeps the social network’s power and decision making out of the hands of any one company or group of people. Bluesky was initially financed with a grant from Twitter under Dorsey; Musk cut ties with the Bluesky team after he bought Twitter.

 

From there, a team of about a half dozen, led by Graber, began building the “AT protocol.” That is a technical term for the code that would essentially let independent developers create their own social networks atop it, while allowing people to carry their digital identities and information across different platforms. Using this technology, Bluesky executives say, people can tailor their own algorithms to show themselves the kinds of social media posts they want to see.

 

In contrast, Facebook and TikTok lock people into their platforms and make it difficult for them to migrate to competitors. The apps are known as “walled gardens,” meaning that what is posted on individual platforms remains only on that platform. (In March, Meta loosened this stance by allowing users to turn on an option that syndicates their Threads posts to other social networks.)

 

Bluesky gained traction after Musk began making major changes to X, including promoting accounts that paid for “blue check” verification status and eliminating content moderation rules. As he put fewer limits on speech across X, some people sought a less noxious online atmosphere in Bluesky. In September, Bluesky’s popularity rose after X was banned in Brazil when Musk refused to comply with a court order to suspend certain accounts. More than three million people joined Bluesky.The last week and a half has been an inflection point.  Since Donald J Trump won the presidential election, some X users have abandoned the platform because of  Musk’s close ties with Trump. Often they have flocked to Bluesky. More than 116,000 people in the United States deactivated their X accounts on the web the day after the election.