Allt fler användare lämnar plattformar som förstörts av Elon Musk och Mark Zuckerberg. Samtidigt växer Bluesky så det knakar.
Den decentraliserade mikrobloggen Bluesky blir mer användarvänlig för varje version. I samband med en app-uppdatering informerades det om en välkommen funktion:
Every post now has the ability to ‘detach’ quote posts.
Quote posts are great but sometimes they’re used to dunk on people. This tool gives you a quick way to remove your post from the quote, reducing the unwanted attention that a quote might bring.
Detta innebär att ett av de viktigaste vapnen i kulturkriget undermineras: de passiv-aggressiva citatinläggen. Man kan såklart alltid skärmdumpa, en beprövad taktik för att kunna fortsätta smäda varandra även när trådar tagits bort. Möjligheten att “lösgöra” citerade inlägg är dock ett effektivt sätt att motarbeta troll, drev och hatkampanjer.
This release is focused on personal moderation controls, and includes a lot of new tools for reducing unwanted attention!
Att Bluesky utvecklar anti-toxicity features som underlättar för den utsatte att försvara sig, kan ställas i relation till hur Elon Musk gjort X till propagandaorgan för Donald Trump och MAGA. Medan användarupplevelsen på X är avhängig Musks känslor och nycker, får den enskilde Bluesky-användaren allt större handlingsutrymme och kontroll över sitt eget flöde. Man prioriterar olika.
Användarökningen på Bluesky går att se i realtid: bsky-users.theo.io
Mer användarstatistik: bsky.jazco.dev/stats
23/9 2024:
25/9 2024:
According to a new report from the Financial Times, Musk's X has lost nearly one-fifth of its daily active user base in the U.S. and a whopping one-third in the UK.
8/11 2024:
Swifties say they’re leaving X over Elon Musk’s support of Donald Trump—and the rhetoric that has erupted on the platform following Trump’s win.
12/11 2024:
Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 700,000 new users in the week since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.
The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.
On the same day that X was attracting the most US visitors, it had the most account deactivations since Elon Musk took charge.
After The New York Times reported that Mr. Musk would spend election night with Mr. Trump, Bluesky’s account posted a message on X: ‘i can guarantee that no bluesky team members will be sitting with a presidential candidate tonight and giving them direct access to control what you see online.’
With Surge in New Users, Bluesky Emerges as X Alternative (New York Times)
13/11 2024:
Short-form posting platform Bluesky crossed the 15 million user mark today amid a recent surge of user signups in the wake of the US presidential election. That’s according to a stat-tracking site put together by Bluesky developer Jaz, using the Bluesky API.
NBC News spoke to six people who have joined or committed to using Threads and Bluesky in place of X after the election because of Musk. Each of them cited growing issues on X, including bots, partisan advertisements and harassment, which they all felt reached a tipping point when Donald Trump was elected president last week with Musk’s support.
14/11 2024:
With one million new accounts added since the U.S. elections, Bluesky has solidified itself as an option for people looking to change their social media service.
With Surge in New Users, Bluesky Emerges as X Alternative (New York Times, 12/11, uppdaterad 14/11)
Bluesky said Thursday evening that over 1 million people signed up for the platform in the last 24 hours, making it one of the busiest days for the company. This also meant the social network crossed the mark of 16 million users overall.
15/11 2024:
Bluesky has seen boomlets of new users before, only for the momentum to slow, but what seems different this time is the general dissatisfaction with X, the divisive nature of the presidential election and the ability for new accounts to quickly find followers and like-minded people through the ingenious use of ‘starter packs’ — curated lists of people to follow in specific niche areas, all with the click of one button.
‘Bluesky Has the Juice’: Celebrities Flee ‘Toxic’ X for Rival Social Media Site (Hollywood Reporter)
17/11 2024:
Even Google appears to trust X less, with one expert telling Sky News the search engine treats X competitor Bluesky as 10 times more important than Elon Musk's platform.
‘The state of most social platforms right now is that users are locked in and developers are locked out,’ Ms. Graber said. ‘We want to build something that makes sure users have the freedom to move and developers have the freedom to build.’
20/11 2024:
I think social media should be basically common infrastructure that society gets to use and evolve it as society evolves, building a more democratic form of social media to reflect a democratic society.
The platform has become so popular that on Monday, Altmetric, a company that tracks where published research is mentioned online, urged publishers to implement a ‘share to Bluesky’ button like those to share content to Facebook, X, or LinkedIn that many websites feature.
21/11 2024:
While alternatives like Thread and Mastodon have also seen growth during this social media exodus, Bluesky’s unique combination of content curation tools, moderation protocols, and general ease of use have provided an opportunity for tabletop creators to rebuild communities that align with their ethics and goals.
The user exodus from X is rooted in more than just platform fatigue. Research by Digital Silk shows that nearly 45% of recent negative reviews of X directly cite Elon Musk, with many users expressing frustration over spam, toxicity and algorithmic manipulation. […] The migration to Bluesky reflects a broader user shift toward platforms prioritizing authenticity and safety over algorithm-driven outrage.
‘The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,’ Graber said. ‘What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.’
22/11 2024:
After an hour or so of scrolling through Bluesky the other night, I felt something I haven’t felt on social media in a long time: free.
Free from Elon Musk, and his tedious quest to turn X into a right-wing echo chamber where he and his friends are the permanent, inescapable main characters.
Bluesky, Smiling at Me (New York Times)
23/11 2024:
The X exodus is weakening a way for conservatives to speak to the masses. […] Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations – literal reactions – to the left.
The Right Has a Bluesky Problem (The Atlantic)
Bluesky’s growth in the US and UK comes after Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg chose to deliberately reduce the prominence of political content across its apps, including Facebook and Instagram.
Meta loses ground to Bluesky as users abandon Elon Musk’s X (Financial Times)
Part of the interest in Bluesky is that it looks and feels like a better version of Twitter. But with Bluesky, it also feels like you can control your experience in the app. That isn’t always the case with Threads, where Meta makes the rules about what shows up in the algorithmic feed that it constantly pushes at you.
Meta, the social media behemoth behind Facebook and Instagram, has launched a raft of tests, tweaks and new features in the past week for its own fledgling X rival, Threads. Several of them seemed designed to fend off the threat Bluesky poses to its status as the leading alternative for people disenchanted with X.
Meta scrambles to respond to upstart social platform Bluesky’s surge (Washington Post)
25/11 2024:
Bluesky has decided to quadruple the size of its contract workforce of content moderators from 25 to 100, the company told Platformer. The move comes in response to Bluesky’s rapid growth since this month’s US presidential election, which triggered a fresh exodus of users away from Elon Musk’s X and over the weekend took the platform past 22 million total users.
Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge (Platformer)
26/11 2024:
Bluesky’s surge may seem sudden, but it has been experiencing bursts of user growth for more than a year, COO Rose Wang told CNBC.
27/11 2024:
Meta may feel threatened by how popular the process of building and sharing Starter Packs has become on Bluesky, allowing people to instantly form connections and feel a part of a growing community.
29/11 2024:
The audience editor for Guardian Australia has said that new social network Bluesky delivered more referral traffic to theguardian.com in its first week on the platform than X has in any week in 2024.
30/11 2024:
On Sunday, Musk confirmed the platform has deprioritized posts including links, which was how journalists and other creators historically shared their work.
2/12 2024:
‘Thirty percent of users Bluesky are posters versus 1% on Twitter,’ [Bluesky Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang] said.
Bluesky says users weary of X's "partisan microphone" are using its service. Here's what to know. (CBS News)
3/12 2024:
‘Subscriptions are the first step [to make money],’ Graber said, referring to a plan to have users pay a regular fee for the ability to upload higher-quality video, for example, or access certain customization features.
Bluesky Now Has 24 Million Users. Jay Graber Is Still Vowing to Keep It From Enshittification (Wired)
5/12 2024:
Bluesky may eventually experiment with ads in a way that doesn’t compromise the core user experience. That could include running ads in Bluesky’s search results, the CEO later clarified offstage, as an example of a less intrusive advertising method the platform could try out.
10/12 2024:
Uppdatering 11/12:
According to the digital market intelligence company Similarweb, the number of daily active US users on X has dropped by 8.4% since early October, from 32.3 million to 29.6 million. The number of Bluesky users has risen by 1,064%, from 254,500 to roughly 2.7 million since 6 October.
13/12 2024:
Now with 25 million users, Bluesky is facing a test that will determine whether or not its platform will still be seen as a safe space and place of refuge from the toxicity of X.
Bluesky at a crossroads as users petition to ban Jesse Singal over anti-trans views, harassment (TechCrunch)
16/12 2024:
So why should I stay on a platform filled with abuse and random porn clips in my mentions while navigating around countless ads for crypto spam when it doesn’t help my business?
22/12 2024:
As Bluesky attracts more activity, particularly from those fleeing Elon Musk’s X, it is facing the price of success: tough moderation decisions and a growing number of bad actors.
Bluesky's growing pains (NBC News)
26/12 2024:
As a special holiday treat, on December 25th, the social media app Bluesky announced that it has added a new feature to its mobile app: a list of Trending topics that lets you know what subjects are popular among its users.
Bluesky adds Trending topics to its arsenal (The Verge)
6/1 2025:
Despite December’s slowdown, Bluesky still had a massive 2024 overall, with year-over-year growth of 930% worldwide, again based on website visits, and two-year growth of 30,564%.
10/1 2025:
If the European Union finds that the X algorithm has been manipulated to push content endorsed by Musk, it can impose hefty fines on the platform — up to 6% of its global revenue — and even block the site across the 27 member states.
23/1 2025:
24/1 2025:
Thousands of survey respondents wrote expressively about how they think Bluesky stacks up against X. ‘Bluesky compares beautifully so far. More civil and informed conversations,’ wrote one. Other positive terms that respondents used to contrast the platform with X included more pleasant, more supportive, friendlier, kinder, nicer, more collegial, uplifting, more peaceful and safer.
14/2 2025:
20/2 2025:
10/3 2025:
What might look like your average black T-shirt is a subtle, yet clear swipe at Mark Zuckerberg, a CEO who represents everything that Bluesky is trying to work against as an open source social network. […] Graber’s shirt — which directly copies the style of a shirt that Zuckerberg wore onstage recently — says Mundus sine caesaribus. Or, ‘a world without Caesars.’
11/3 2025:
13/3 2025:
18/3 2025:
In essence, Bluesky is offering would-be rivals a toolbox they can use to build their own vision of social media. ‘You return competition and innovation to the social media space,’ Graber says—including, of course, competitors to Bluesky itself. She isn’t worried. In fact, that was the plan all along.
7/4 2025:
With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and [Jay] Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as ‘around thirty-three’) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men.
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media (The New Yorker)
9/4 2025:
Bluesky has overtaken its flailing rival X in hosting posts related to new academic research, indicating the platform is fast becoming the go-to place for scholars to share their work.
X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research (Times Higher Education)
17/4 2025:
21/4 2025:
19/5 2025:
29/5 2025:
5/6 2025: