Bluesky, Threads see influx of users after Trump election win

Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of X, has supported Donald Trump’s winning campaign all the way. Now, the more right-leaning platform has bled even more users who are seeking alternatives.

Bluesky, a decentralized network originally funded by Twitter, has added more than 700,000 users in the week after the US presidential election. The platform now has 14.5 million accounts, up from 10 million in September.

The network has seen similar increases previously – for instance, Bluesky added 3 million new users after X was blocked in Brazil and another 1.2 million after X said it would allow users to view posts from accounts that had blocked them.

But now, the majority of new accounts are from the US. It looks like most newbies are migrating from X where Musk is tolerating hate speech and far-right activism.

Bots are also prevalent, and because moderation is now minimal, many users, especially the more liberal kind, have decided to escape.

Plus, Musk, who has more than 200 million followers, is relentlessly pushing Trump’s agenda. More progressive users don’t want to support Musk’s business by staying active on the platform – and then there’s all the hate.

New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the more famous personalities who has migrated to Bluesky. On Monday, she posted: “Good GOD it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings.”

I don’t even know why I stopped using this in the first place? Good GOD it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings. Can someone give a Cliff Notes of what went down here over the last year? Tea, dev notes, big memes, whatever is best please

undefined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 12:49 AM

Bluesky apparently also offers more engagement to users who find comments, reposts, and likes important.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, conducted an experiment by publishing the same post to X and Bluesky and saw that engagement per follower was more than 10 times higher on Bluesky.

as an experiment, I posted the same post to twitter and bluesky. here is the time series of engagements (sum of comments, reposts, likes) from the two platforms. Note that I have 39K followers on twitter and 7K here, so engagement per follower here is more than 10 times higher here on bluesky.

[image or embed]

undefined Andrew Dessler (@andrewdessler.com) November 12, 2024 at 1:24 AM

Meta’s Threads app is another alternative that seems to be doing well. It has more than 275 million monthly users (up from 150 million in April) and is the top-rated free app in Apple’s App Store.

However, many users say they have also migrated from Threads to Bluesky because Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, has been limiting the visibility of political content across its platforms.