What is Bluesky, the quick-growing social platform welcoming fleeing X users?

SAN FRANCISCO — Disgruntled X users are again flocking to Bluesky, a newer social media platform that grew out of the former Twitter before billionaire Elon Musk took it over in 2022. While it remains tiny compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk.

Championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the community in February. That invite-only period gave the site period to construct out moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Musk’s X, with a “discover” feed and a chronological feed for accounts that users pursue. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as discover “starter packs” that provide a curated list of people and custom feeds to pursue.

Bluesky said in mid-November that its total users surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the complete of October, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and talk to others online. The post-election uptick in users isn’t the first period Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X. The platform gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August — 85% of them from Brazil, the corporation said. About 500,000 recent users signed up in one day in October, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to view a user’s community posts.

Across the platform, recent users — among them journalists, left-leaning politicians and celebrities — have posted memes and shared that they were looking forward to using a space free from advertisements and despise talk. Some said it reminded them of the early days of Twitter more than a decade ago.

Despite Bluesky’s growth, X posted after the election that it had “dominated the global exchange on the U.S. election” and had set recent records.

Bluesky, though, has bigger ambitions than to supplant X. Beyond the platform itself, it is building a technical foundation — what it calls “a protocol for community exchange” — that could make social networks work across different platforms — also known as interoperability — like email, blogs or phone numbers.

Currently, you can’t cross between social platforms to leave a comment on someone’s account. Twitter users must remain on Twitter and TikTok users must remain on TikTok if they desire to interact with accounts on those services. large Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-concentrated business models.

Bluesky is trying to reimagine all of this and working toward interoperability.