After the election, Bluesky is witnessing an exodus of dissatisfied X users

X, formerly Twitter, is now not “digital city market– once promised that it might be so. In the wake of the US presidential election results, a wave of users dissatisfied with the app’s latest direction are moving to a rival app, Bluesky.

Decentralized social media platform Bluesky continues to grow with over 9 million users from September to 14.6+ million as of Tuesday, with the last spike occurring over the weekend as US users fled X.

The exodus briefly placed Bluesky as the No. 2 iPhone app in the U.S. App Store on Monday, down from No. 27 the day after the election. Today it has dropped barely to third place, behind Threads Meta and ChatGPT.

It is also value being attentive to the rate of registration of recent users. Yesterday, many sockets reported that Bluesky added over 700,000 users in the last week, bringing its total to 14.5 million. A day later, the number is over 14.6 million, meaning around 100,000 users join each day.

Bluesky downloads in the U.S. are up 933% year-to-date, while X downloads are up 48%, in line with app analytics firm Appfigures. Appfigures also noted that Bluesky downloads on November 10 increased by 624% in comparison with November 1.

what’s more, According to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says engagement at Bluesky is typically higher than at X – and that is not a recent trend. While X still has that number because many users abandon but don’t delete their X accounts, Bluesky tends to have the next percentage of “posters” — those that are actively engaging quite than lurking, Graber says.

“We have… a higher percentage of posters than most social media sites that operate according to the 90-9-1 pattern: lurkers-commenters-posters. We didn’t go below ~30% of posters,” she noted in Bluesky post on Tuesday. For newbies, she recommends posting on relevant channels, commenting on others’ posts, finding friends (those you follow who in turn follow you) and using hashtags to extend engagement together with your own content.

The shift in user adoption follows changes lon Musk has made since purchasing the company formerly referred to as Twitter in the fall of 2022. The Telsa and SpaceX executive originally promised to show his $44 billion acquisition right into a free speech platform where everyone’s voice could be heard. Instead, Musk used the app to promote right-wing views, campaign for TrumpAND stop at the next rate than before Data from X’s own transparency report.

While Musk can have once believed that Twitter favored the left, he has not turned the app right into a neutral platform. In fact, research found that Musk’s right-wing political posts appeared in X users’ feeds, even when users didn’t follow him or engage along with his content.

With his 204 million followersthe platform gives Musk incredible reach to advertise his own political opinions and support Trump.

Of course, some fear that Bluesky itself will develop into a partisan platform if it is flooded by liberals leaving X. However, the nature of the way this platform is built doesn’t allow it to be guided by the political opinions of its owner. In addition to the standard blocking and reporting features, Bluesky allows users to create their very own algorithms and custom channels, and subscribe to their very own moderation services to personalize the app to their liking. If the Bluesky app and moderation decisions don’t fit your needs, people will give you the option to run the social software on their very own servers, little just like Mastodon, an open source X competitor (although Bluesky uses a distinct protocol, AT protocolas an alternative of Mastodon and Threads’ ActivePub.)

Interest in Bluesky has been growing for a while, and never only because of its infrastructure and architecture. Bluesky has benefited from other increases before, corresponding to when X was banned in Brazil and when Threads handled moderation issues, for instance. However, this latest increase indicates that increasingly more left-leaning users are deciding to stop using X. Without the combative, back-and-forth political chat that Twitter is famous for, its future as a “global marketplace” becomes increasingly uncertain.