Bluesky, the alternative social network for users who leave X

You may have recently seen Bluesky’s logo appear on your social networks and are wondering what people are talking about.

It is an alternative platform to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), although its logo, colors and design are very similar. Bluesky is growing rapidly and currently adds about one million users per day. At the time of writing it had 16.7 million users, but it will probably be more by the time you read this. What is Bluesky and why are so many people joining it?

What is Bluesky

Bluesky describes itself as “a social network as it should be”, although it looks quite similar to others. At first glance, nothing special catches the eye. Buttons on the top left offer what one would expect: search, notifications, home page, etc. Users comment, post, share and indicate what content they like.

In fact, it looks a lot like the X network did when it was still known as Twitter. The big difference is that Bluesky is decentralized, meaning that users can choose to host their information on servers other than the company’s own.

So, instead of being limited to having an account with the Bluesky name, users can sign up to use an account that they will own.

But the vast majority of users do not do this and settle for the default account, which will almost certainly have “bsky.social” written after the chosen username.

Who Bluesky belongs to

Considering how much it resembles the old Twitter, you won’t be surprised to learn that its creator is Jack Dorsey, the founder of the social network of the little bird. Dorsey once said that he wanted Bluesky to be a decentralized version of Twitter, where no one person had control or ownership.

But Dorsey is no longer part of the team managing it, as he resigned his board seat in May 2024. In September he deleted his account. It is now run by Jay Graber, its chief executive, who also holds majority ownership.

Why it is becoming popular

Created in 2019, it worked by invitation only until February this year. That allowed the developers to work out all the kinks before opening it to the general public. Even so, the flood of new users has been such in November that there have been several crashes of its system.