Bluesky has passed the 20 million user mark, continuing its recent rapid growth. The decentralized service, which had 15 million users less than a week ago, has nearly tripled its user base in the past three months.
While this is still far less than its competitors Threads and X, Bluesky’s current momentum is noticeable. Over the past week, there have been several days when the app has added a million new users in a single day. This is similar to the growth rate of Threads, which has been gaining a million new signups a day for “three months now,” according to an update last week from Meta’s Adam Mosseri. Earlier this month, Threads reached 275 million monthly users, with at least 15 million added since the beginning of November.
Although Bluesky remains an outsider, there are other signs that it is gaining momentum. According to App Figures, an analytical company, Bluesky has been the top app on Apple’s App Store for the last six days and the top non-gaming app on Google Play for four days. Meta’s Threads is currently ranked second in the App Store.
While Bluesky has experienced other periods of significant growth over the past year, the recent surge is much larger than the open source service has seen before. Bluesky’s recent growth seems to be at least partially driven by the growing frustration of some X users. According to a report by analytics company SimilarWeb, traffic to Bluesky spiked on November 7, the day after the presidential election. This spike seems to have coincided with a surge in users trying to deactivate their accounts on X.
Bluesky is also looking to differentiate its policy from its larger competitors. Last week, the company promised that it would not use its users’ content to train generative AI. X’s new privacy policy allows it to partner with third parties to train AI models based on users’ past tweets. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also stated that it does not want to “overload the network with ads.” Threads, meanwhile, reportedly plans to start experimenting with its first ads in January.
