After Elon Musk bought Twitter (now rebranded X) in 2022, disaffected users began to seek alternatives. Alongside Meta’s Threads and the open source project Mastodon, Bluesky was one of several contenders.
Threads benefited from Meta’s existing user base but has failed to capture the popular imagination. Mastodon has proven complicated and difficult to grasp for most ordinary users and so use remains fragmented. Bluesky seemed promising but was in invite-only mode at the time and growth was muted.
But in recent weeks, the migration to Bluesky from X seems to have reached a tipping point, as large parts of the user community finally got fed up with X’s toxic culture and management. Following the recent US presidential election, in which Musk appeared to manipulate X’s algorithms to increase his own influence, these users found Bluesky’s doors wide open.
Since then, the user base has grown to more than 20 million users, a number that continues to climb. As others have noted, at least for the moment it feels a bit like early Twitter – a sandpit to explore new tools, a playful connection to the broader internet, and a relatively safe place to share personal thoughts and experiences, or to connect with friends and colleagues.
Bluesky looks very similar to X. Its azure butterfly icon bears obvious resemblances to Twitter’s blue bird, which Musk replaced with a stark white-on-black X.
Bluesky uses hashtags and users address one another using the @ symbol. Replies, quotes and reposts all work much as they do on X.........