What is Bluesky & Why is it becoming so Popular?

On social media, the word ‘Bluesky’ has been trending in recent weeks.

It is an alternative platform to Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, and it looks similar when it comes to its colour and logo.

Bluesky is growing rapidly and is currently seeing around one million new users every day.

So what is Bluesky and why are so many people joining?

It describes itself as “social media as it should be”, although it looks similar to other sites.

Visually, a bar on the left of the page shows expected things like search, notifications and a homepage.

Users can post, comment, repost and like their favourite things.

It looks how X used to look but the main difference is Bluesky is decentralised, which means users can host their data on servers other than those owned by the company.

This means that rather than being limited to having a specific account named after Bluesky, people have the option to sign up using an account they own themselves.

However, most users don’t do that and a new joiner will most likely have “.bsky.social” at the end of their username.

Who owns Bluesky?

The similarity between X and Bluesky is no coincidence as the former head of Twitter Jack Dorsey created it.

He even once said he wanted Bluesky to be a decentralised version of Twitter that no single person or entity owns.

But Dorsey is no longer part of the team, having stepped down in May 2024 and deleted his account in September.

It is now run and predominantly owned by chief executive Jay Graber as a US public benefit corporation.

Why has it become so Popular?

Although Bluesky has been around since 2019, it was invitation-only until February 2024.

The developers worked on stabilising it before opening it to the wider public and while it has worked to some extent, the flurry of new users has been so significant in November that there continue to be issues with outages.

The number of new Bluesky users spiked following Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections in November.

Musk was a Trump backer during his campaign and will be involved in his administration.

Inevitably, this has led to a political division, with some people leaving X in protest.

But others like the Guardian have cited different reasons.

Meanwhile, Bluesky’s app continues to rack up downloads and is currently the top free app in the Apple App Store in the UK.

But while this growth is significant, it will have to continue for a long time for it to fully challenge X.

X does not share its total user numbers but it is understood to be measured in the hundreds of millions, with Elon Musk previously saying the platform had 250 million users each day.

How does Bluesky make Money?

Bluesky began with funding from investors and venture capital firms, raising tens of millions of dollars.

But with so many new users, the platform will have to find a new way to make money.

When it was Twitter, most of its money came through advertising. But Bluesky says it wants to avoid this. Instead, it will continue to look into paid services, such as having people pay for custom domains in their usernames.

In more simple terms, it comes down to a person’s username being even more personalised.

Supporters of this idea say it doubles up as a form of verification as the organisation which owns Bluesky would have to clear its use.

If Bluesky’s owners continue to avoid advertising, they may have to consider other options, such as subscription features.

But if Bluesky is not making much money, that would not be unusual.

Before Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, it made a profit twice in its eight years of being publicly traded.

This ended with a huge payday for investors when Musk paid £34.7 billion for it.

The current future of Bluesky remains unknown but it is growing quickly every day.