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Since the election, Bluesky has acquired millions of new users and surpassed Threads on app stores.
Many new Bluesky users are praising the feeling on the site as being similar to "old Twitter."
Social media researchers told BI users wait for a large enough user base before switching sites.
Bluesky still has a long way to go before it's a true challenger to Meta's Threads and Elon Musk's X — at least in terms of user numbers — but it's playing catchup fast among users nostalgic for a simpler format.
This week, the app shot to the top of Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store, and a Bluesky spokesperson told Business Insider it hit 18.3 million registered users.
While still a far cry from the 259 million active daily users Musk says are on X and 275 million monthly active users on Threads, activity on Bluesky has also seen a noticeable uptick.
New users on Bluesky have been publicly praising the site's similarity to "old Twitter," complete with a reverse chronological timeline, less hate speech and misinformation, and more control over what content is shown in your feed.
The growth has the potential to snowball. Social media researchers told Business Insider that users, for fear of missing out, often wait to change their digital habits until new social sites demonstrate there's frequent enough — and relevant — activity on the platform to join in.
Much of the new pull toward Bluesky can be attributed to the platform finally tapping into that "network effect," Jonathan Bellack, the director of Harvard's Applied Social Media Lab, told Business Insider. Enough people now seem to have joined the site to reach a critical mass, so users don't feel like they're missing out on content on other platforms or losing their online community by switching, he said.
It also helps when the people who make the switch have some social capital, too.
"Hello Less Hateful World," Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur, posted on Bluesky on Tuesday last week, announcing that he'd made it his new primary social media platform. While still somewhat active on X, Cuban has reposted lists of users he recommends following on Bluesky in an effort to rebuild his social media community on the new platform.
In an email to Business Insider, Cuban said he likes Bluesky better than the alternatives.
"The variety of content and engagement is improving daily," Cuban said. "The different verticals are filling out as sources of news and information as well."
Cuban said Threads "also has value." So he'll be posting there, too, but he'll prioritize Bluesky going forward. The Cost Plus Drugs cofounder has 8.9 million followers on X, 659,000 on Threads, and 384,700 on Bluesky.
Representatives for X did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Estimates from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company, said daily active users of the Bluesky mobile app in the US increased 73% the week after the election, rising 40% more — to 2.6 million daily users — by the following Thursday. That's compared to 31.2 million for X and 4.3 million for Threads in the same time period.
A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Threads, told Business Insider that the platform has seen more than 15 million signups in November, with more than one million signups per day for almost three months. The spokesperson added that the company has been "pleased to see Threads' steady growth since it launched last year."
But Meta's sprawling, interconnected brand has "somewhat muddied" Threads' appeal to users who are turning toward decentralized social media, said Stephen Lind, an associate professor of business communication at USC Marshall School of Business. That may be a reason Similarweb found Bluesky drew in more traffic than Threads in the immediate aftermath of the election.
Data from Similarweb indicates Election Day also saw a surge of deactivations on X, with more than 280,000 people closing their accounts worldwide in a single day. Research by Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, shows X's daily active users have stayed flat since the election, while Threads' jumped 8% — and Bluesky's more than 119%.
Lind said Bluesky "provides a compelling alternative" to X, especially for users who don't appreciate Musk's approach to social media.
"Consumers, time and time again, show us that they will put a brand in jeopardy if the leadership is associated with ideology the consumers don't care for," Lind told Business Insider. "The catch is, though, that for many there has to be a viable alternative, or that principled behavior sometimes takes a backseat."
A spokesperson for Bluesky told Business Insider that the platform aims to give users more choice and offer creators independence from being locked into specific platforms.
"It's clear that people want an open and transparent social network that puts users first," the Bluesky spokesperson said. "We've heard from users that they're receiving incredibly high levels of engagement from real people, and that most importantly, they're having fun again."
But not everyone is switching. Advertisers are still noticeably absent from both Threads and Bluesky, and the similarities to pre-Musk Twitter aren't a selling point for everyone.
Jack Dorsey, who co-founded both platforms, said in May that he decided to leave Bluesky because it was becoming too much like Twitter and was "literally repeating all the mistakes" Twitter made — namely concerning content moderation, which Dorsey said is largely at odds with how a decentralized platform that is not owned and controlled by one colossal tech company should run.
A few weeks ago, Bluesky had less than 1 million daily users in the US, "so the acceleration is tremendous," said David Carr, an editor at Similarweb. "It is very, very, very early to see whether this is kind of a momentary blip for Bluesky or something that lasts, but I personally see potential."
