Bluesky gains more than 1.25 million followers since U.S. election

Social media platform Bluesky, a competitor to Elon Musk's X, has gained more than 1.25 million users since last week's U.S. presidential election.

Bluesky posted Wednesday morning it had reached more than 15 million users, up from nine million in September.

The influx appears to be driven largely by people moving over from X, upset by Musk's campaigning for Donald Trump and the president-elect's naming of Musk to co-head government efficiency.

"Bluesky" was a trending search term on X Wednesday, where some users called the shift a "mass migration."

Megan Boler, a professor at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, who studies social media, says the U.S. election has been a "hugely motivating force" for users who were already thinking about leaving X. She herself is planning to do the same, having set up a Bluesky account on Wednesday. 

"I think there's already, in many circles, a great deal of mistrust of Elon Musk. This is the nail in the coffin."

Users splitting along ideological lines: prof

Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion US and renamed the platform X the following year. He has been criticized for changes including altering key features of the site, amplifying his own posts and suspending accounts that share opposing political views.

Musk said in May that X still had 600 million monthly active users.

Since Musk's acquisition, the site has come to be viewed as mirroring the conservative views of its owner. Now, many view challenger Bluesky as a friendlier alternative for those with more progressive views, with its more decentralized approach that gives users more control over the posts they see. Some say its user base is less hostile and that their posts get more engagement. 

Boler says it makes sense that users are beginning to split along ideological lines because people don't tend to use social media to build bridges and have conversations, but rather to be entrenched in their existing views.

She says the shift to Bluesky could be useful for people who are looking to re-establish a sense of shared information in a fragmented news landscape.

"I think there is something very constructive about a gesture like this, when there's a lot of despair, a lot of sense of powerlessness," she said.

"I anticipate that people are wanting to figure out ways to re-establish stronger political solidarity and community."

Bluesky has seen other major gains in recent months, for example picking up three million new users in the week after X was briefly suspended in Brazil in September.

New users coming from North America and U.K.

Emily Liu, a Bluesky spokesperson, told CBC in an email that most of the new users in the past week are coming from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. 

"We're seeing increased activity levels across all different forms of engagement," she said. "We're excited to welcome so many communities to Bluesky, which range from Swifties to sports fans to journalists." 

The platform still trails Threads, a similar app owned by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, which reported last month it had grown to 275 million monthly users, though some have questioned how many of those are actually active. 

Bluesky began as a project within Twitter, as it was then known, but split from the company in 2022. The platform dropped its invitation-only format this February.

Seth Lewis, chair of emerging media at the University of Oregon's journalism school, says Bluesky is the closest replica of X in terms of format, style and user interface, and provides a lot of what people used to like about Twitter — without the toxicity and general trolling many experience on X. 

"I think folks are looking for other platforms that have different algorithmic functions and that also allow them to connect with people, as opposed to being bombarded by so many spambots and other problems."

Where will journalists go?

While the 2010s were marked by the consolidation of social media platforms, he says the shift now is undoing those trends, which brings with it pros and cons — people are finding more comfortable places to engage, but also splintering further into niche communities in a time of increasing division and polarization. 

Lewis says academics are flocking to Bluesky, but the big question will be where journalists go. X has long been their primary domain where they share their work and connect with sources.

"That's where many key public officials, and where journalists and other major media actors are at. As long as they're there, then X is going to continue to have this kind of outsized influence of the conversation," he said. 

For example, he said, U.S. President Joe Biden's use of X to announce in July he was ending his re-election campaign speaks to the platform's salience.

While many are moving over from X to make a statement, Lewis says time will tell whether Bluesky can maintain that momentum and deal a significant blow to X. 

"You might lose a few million here or there over this rejection of Elon and rejection of the platform, but whether it actually makes a difference, I think, is not as certain."