Social media is a heavily politicized space and following the election users went on to social media as a place to express how they feel about the results. In this, many users find safety or comfort in their chosen community on social media.
Since Elon Musk, X’s CEO, has had close ties to President-elect Donald Trump including giving more than $100 million to the America political action committee (PAC) for Trump, many more left-leaning users have been leaving X in order to seek out other social media platforms like Threads and Bluesky.
Former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, founded Bluesky in 2019 and when fundraising on X for it he described it as a “small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers.” After gaining funding, Dorsey launched it in February 2021 for public use.
Bluesky operates in a similar manner to X, or more accurately, how Twitter originally functioned before being bought out by Musk. Users are limited to 256 characters, they can include photos in their posts and they can like, reply to, and retweet what they see. Unlike X, it does not require any payment for any of its features.
It is also decentralized, meaning that it is run on independent servers rather than centralized ones, which provides increased privacy and security for users. While Threads is supported by Meta alongside Instagram and Facebook, making the profiles on all of those accounts connected, Bluesky is a social media platform that aims to be more personal. Bluesky, even, was initially invite-only and then expanded to allow everyone on the platform in February 2024 in order to reach a wider audience.
In the seven days following the election, Bluesky gained at least one million users. Similar surges in users occurred in the past when Musk claimed X would be put behind a paywall and when Brazil banned X and had a case against Musk. Meaning that often, when Musk does something controversial to X, users often seek out an alternative and again have done this in response to Musk being openly supportive of Trump. In general, X has seen a downward trend since Musk acquired the app in 2022.
Bluesky is currently at the top of free apps on the App Store even over Threads, ChatGPT, Google, Temu and TikTok. In response to the surge, the official account of Bluesky wrote on their platform, “Hello and welcome to the 1M people that have joined Bluesky in the last week.”
Those one million users have joined for a variety of reasons and with differing interests.
“What’s interesting to me is the diversity of communities coming to Bluesky last week,” Bluesky Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang wrote in an email to Bloomberg.
Specific communities she highlighted that had been joining the site since the election were fans of wrestling, city planners, and fans of Taylor Swift. Fans of Taylor Swift may be leaving in part due to the fact that Swift herself publicly supported Harris and spoke out against Trump.
Bluesky is at 14.5 million accounts currently, with most new users being from the US. The shift of users, specifically those who are against Trump, joining Bluesky may represent the further polarization of political stances on social media websites and right-wing growth on X.
