Bluesky is having a moment — a moment that’s already stretched on for nearly three months.
Over the summer, the social media app saw a wave of new signups in Brazil after X (formerly Twitter) was temporarily banned there. And in the United States, unhappiness with changes at X, and with owner Elon Musk’s close relationship with President-Elect Donald Trump, seem to have dramatically accelerated Bluesky’s growth.
According to SimilarWeb, X’s traffic and account deactivations both peaked the day after the presidential election. Bluesky, meanwhile, says it’s started adding a million new users every day; on Saturday, the company announced that it now has 18 million total users, and it’s currently the number one free app on Apple’s App Store.
This has, unsurprisingly, caused some problems, with periods of slowness or downtime, as well as challenges for content moderation and safety. In an interview with The New York Times, CEO Jay Graber acknowledged that there are “always some growing pains,” but she said her 20-person full-time team takes “pride in our ability to scale quickly.”
Alongside the technical issues, longtime users seem to be wrestling with what this rapid growth means for the Bluesky community. Yes, there have been triumphant posts about App Store rankings and the latest celebrity signups, but also self-deprecating discourse about the qualifications for being “Bluesky elder,” handwringing when the wrong kinds of users show up, and pleading/scolding reminders to “don’t engage, just block” when dealing with trolls.
I’ve even noticed that my own weird relationship with Bluesky is changing. While I’ve spent more time there than on any other social media app in the past year, my follower count stalled at around 200 — a fact that I found freeing, though not freeing enough for me to post more than once a month or so. This week, the numbers started to go up again, and even though they’re still pretty low (I used to be big on other social networks, I swear), I immediately started to worry that someone might actually notice if I said something stupid.
Despite my own Bluesky presence being negligible, I do feel protective about it. I suppose it’s a familiar story: Early fans are always complaining when something new and cool gets discovered by the mainstream. And no, I’m not about to start posting “Keep Bluesky weird!” or declaring, “Bluesky is over!” But I worry that what’s been fun and weird and even life-affirming about the Bluesky community could dissipate or disappear with the influx of new users.
Put another way: Bluesky has always felt like the small, left-y alternative to X. So what makes Bluesky Bluesky when it’s no longer the “short king” of social media? Seeing so many familiar names from Old Twitter, I wondered if we’re just going to recreate Twitter circa 2014. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing, but in 2024, can’t we do better?
At least Bluesky’s executives have signaled that they want to do things differently. Some of the distinctions, like the focus on decentralization, may be largely invisible to regular users, but many of their priorities seem baked into the product and the business. There are the aggressive blocking features, the reverse chronological (not algorithmic) feed, the pledge to not train AI on users’ posts, and a future business model focused on paid subscriptions rather than advertising.
Graber is aware of a potential culture clash, describing it as an “eternal September” problem, where old-timers become unhappy when waves of newbies show up and inevitably change things. She said Bluesky is looking to address this by adding more features to allow users to customize their experience, and by improving its automated content moderation tools.
Maybe the coming months and years will demonstrate that those decisions and features can actually protect and nourish healthy online communities. And maybe we’ve all learned something from seeing how other social networks wither with toxicity or sterility. I hope so. And if not? Well, one thing I‘ve learned from Twitter is that you should always be ready to move on to the next app.
