Microblogging platform Bluesky nets 700000 members after Trump ...
Tired users look for friendlier place to tweet
Life
Social media users are voting with their keyboards after a particularly fractious presidential campaign in the US and leaving the X for the more privacy frienly alternative Bluesky.
Since the re-election of Donald Trump election last week, Bluesky has recorded 700,000 new users looking for a kinder place to post. That brings the tally to a modest 14.5 million, Bluesky’s COO Rose Wang confirmed to The Verge.
Bluesky is a decentralised network, meaning anyone with some technical knowledge can maintain their own Bluesky server. Mastodon works in a similar way.
Since February 2024, anyone who wants to can take an account the company with a butterfly as its logo. Until then, it was invitation-only for years.
Instagram’s Threads, a much larger competitor, has 275 million monthly users.
Twitter was rebranded as ‘X’ after its purchase by Elon Musk, a decision that has led to a decline in profitability and massive layoffs. A self-confessed ‘free speech absolutist’ Musk vowed the platform wouild not be moderated – a decision that as landed him on the wrong side of the EU’s Digital Services Act. His involvemet in the US presidential election also brought with it accusations that X’s algorithm was being constantly tweaked to make sure his posts got the most engagement – posts that often either promoted Trump’s campaign outright or drew attention to subjects of interest to Trump voters.
A quick scroll through any users’ feed would reveal some useful content but also posts from paid subscribers identifiable by Twitter’s old blue tick mark. The tenor of conversation is frequently aggressive and conversations quickly devolve into a mess of ad hominem attacks, ‘gotcha’ moments, and AI-generated memes. The winding down of moderation teams has also left the site riddled with misinformation and disinformation campaigns.
Will Musk care that he is losing eyebals as well as advertisers? Probably not. The richest man in the world is reliant on government contracts to kep his SpaceX and Tesla businesses going, staying on the good side of an incoming president will pay off in the long term.
Last month, Bluesky completed a Series A funding round that raised $15 million in venture capital. The round was led by Blockchain Capital. That also has stakes in Coinbase, Kraken, Worldcoin and Opensea.
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