Is everyone flocking to Bluesky? Platform adds 1 million users in a week

By Michaela Walters (with Emily, Jon & Lewis)

What's happening over on Bluesky – and can it really rival X/Twitter, as more than a million people sign up in a week?

Read time: 4 minutes

In brief:

• Bluesky, a social media platform similar to X, has seen a rapid influx of 1 million new users in just 1 week, causing its user base to surge to 15 million.
• The growth is attributed to users increasingly seeking alternatives to X, especially following controversies around Elon Musk's ownership and concerns over disinformation and political ties on the platform.
• Bluesky is positioning itself as a cleaner, less toxic social network, free from the political baggage of Twitter.

What’s the story?

When we logged on this morning, opening up endless tabs, we noticed something unusual. The number of people following The News Agents on Bluesky had doubled overnight - from 12,000 followers to 24,000.

Still small numbers in the grand scheme of things, we hear you say - but a growth rate like that stops you in your tracks.

Bluesky is a relatively new social media platform - and usually growth on such networks happens slowly and steadily. But this was sharp and fast.

There was no viral post to account for the figure, no celebrity retweet (or whatever the Bluesky term for that is - does anyone know yet?) So why the sudden spike?

As much as we’d love to say it’s just an outpouring of love for The News Agents, we aren’t the anomaly. We are part of a pattern.

Plenty of people, our very own Lewis Goodall included, have seen significant increases in their follower counts as of late.

Bluesky posted on Tuesday it has had 1 million new users join in a single week, pushing it to 15 million users in total. It is also currently number one on the Apple app charts.

“The growth is phenomenal,” Lewis points out on today’s episode of The News Agents.

The trend is spreading, with Jon Sopel also jumping on board the Bluesky train.

“When I leave the studio this afternoon, I'm going to join up and become a new Bluesky recruit.”

That’s 15,000,001, Bluesky will be pleased to hear.

Something, it seems, is brewing.

So what is Bluesky, and why is it suddenly so popular?

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a social media platform that is remarkably similar to X, formerly Twitter. It shares a familiar interface and has comparable functions - allowing you to post text up to 300 characters, alongside images and videos (although currently only up to one minute long).

Logged in, you’ll find the posts of everyone you ‘follow’ - as expected. It has a ‘discover’ feed - displayed with the now synonymous ‘#’ symbol, and of course you can retweet, or repost – whatever we’re calling it.

It’s no surprise the platform is a carbon copy of Twitter, it was created in 2019 by Jack Dorsery - the then-Twitter CEO, as an internal project to investigate the possibility of decentralizing the platform.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the two platforms cut all ties. Bluesky developed, and opened registrations to the general public in February 2024. It is now primarily owned by chief executive Jay Graber.

Is it time for The News Agents to leave Twitter?

Where’s the growth come from?

The platform has seen spikes in sign-ups following controversies with X. For example, it gained three million new users when X was suspended in Brazil.

But more often, it’s not people being forced off of X that’s causing the shift - it’s people choosing an alternative.

When the UK saw riots break out this summer after the tragic stabbings in Southport, disinformation and misinformation spread like wildfire on X.

At the time Lewis noticed a “substantial shift”, with some people switching over to Bluesky and others to Mark Zuckerberg’s equivalent platform, Threads.

More recently, it’s been X owner Elon Musk’s involvement in the US presidential election that’s caused concern, with Musk using his platform to push Trump’s message.

The Guardian announced this week that it will no longer be posting on X, claiming that, “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.”

And now the election is over and it’s confirmed that Trump will return to the White House, Emily ponders: “Is x essentially an arm of Trump's incoming government?”

“I guess it has made everyone think about X in terms of what it tells us about the power line and the medium and the message straight to the President,” she adds.

Jon puts it more directly: “Is X Truth Social, but 10 times the size?”

Bluesky, for now, is free from political ties, and mostly from toxicity. And people seem to like it - the numbers speak for themselves.

“It's kind of like Twitter, sort of a la 2021,” Lewis says, joking that it’s almost “too nice”.

“After 10 minutes on it, you almost want to go back to Twitter just for a bit of toxicity.”

You can find The News Agents on Bluesky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thenewsagents.bsky.social and yes, we did add a few thousand followers in the process of writing this.

Listen to the latest episode of The News Agents.

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