Why X Users Shift to Bluesky, What is It?

Recently, you may have noticed the term “Bluesky” appearing on your social media accounts and wondered what people were talking about.

It is an alternate platform to Elon Musk’s X, and it resembles his platform in terms of color and branding.

Bluesky is growing quickly; at the moment, it is gaining about a million new users every day.

It had 16.7 million members when this was written, but by the time you read this, that number is probably going to be out of date.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky considers itself “social media as it should be” while having a similar appearance to other sites.

Everything you may anticipate is visually shown in a bar to the left of the page, including a homepage, search, and notifications.

The platform allows users to like, comment, repost, and post their favorite content.

In simple terms, it looks just like X, the former name for Twitter.

The main difference is that Bluesky is decentralised, a technical word that essentially means users can store their data on servers other than the company’s.

As a result, users can sign up using an account they own, if they so choose, instead of being restricted to having a specific account named after Bluesky.

However, it’s important to note that the great majority of users don’t, and a new member’s username will almost certainly end in “.bsky.social.”

Who is Bluesky’s owner?

The reason why it feels so much like X won’t surprise you. It was founded by the former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

He even stated at one point that he hoped Bluesky will be a decentralized Twitter that is not owned by a single individual or organization.

However, Mr. Dorsey has left the team behind it, having resigned from the board in May 2024.

It is currently a US public benefit corporation that is primarily owned and operated by CEO Jay Graber.

What’s making it more and more popular?

Although Bluesky was founded in 2019, it was exclusively accessible by invitation until February of this year.

This gave the developers the opportunity to work out any issues behind the scenes in an attempt to stabilize it before making it available to the general public.

The strategy has, in part, succeeded. Outages are still an issue because of the huge increase of new users in November.

The sudden increase in new Bluesky users after Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections in November is no coincidence.

Mr. Musk, the owner of X, was a major supporter of Trump during his campaign and will play a significant role in his administration.

Political discord is unavoidable as a result of this, and some people have left X in protest.

Others, including the Guardian newspaper, have given various explanations, stating that X is “a toxic media platform” and has decided to stop posting through it.

On Thursday, Bluesky’s app was the most downloaded free app in the UK’s Apple App Store, and it continues to receive a lot of downloads globally.

Several celebrities, like pop artist Lizzo and Taskmaster’s Greg Davies, have declared their intention to join the platform and either reduce or completely stop using X.

You may also recognize Patton Oswalt, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Ben Stiller.

Even though this increase is noteworthy, it will take a while before Bluesky can seriously compete with its microblogging opponent.

Although Elon Musk earlier claimed that the platform has 250 million daily users, X does not disclose its actual user count, which is believed to be in the hundreds of millions.

How does Bluesky make money?

It is truly the million-dollar question.

Bluesky began by raising money from investors and venture capital firms, and it has now raised tens of millions of dollars.

But it will need to figure out how to pay the bills because there are so many additional users.

The vast majority of Twitter’s revenue in its prime came from advertising.

Bluesky has stated that it want to stay clear of this. Rather, it stated that it will keep investigating premium services, such charging users for unique domains in their username.

That may sound difficult, but it really boils down to making a person’s username even more unique.

For instance, it could imply that my username, @twgerken.bsky.social, would eventually seem more formal, like @twgerken.bbc.co.uk.

Advocates of this concept claim that since the website’s owner would need to approve its use, it also serves as a kind of verification.

The proprietors of Bluesky might eventually have to turn to more expansive choices, such membership features, in order to keep the lights on if they keep avoiding advertising.

However, it would not be out of the ordinary for tech businesses to be producing relatively little money.
Prior to being acquired by Mr. Musk in 2022, Twitter had only turned a profit twice in its eight years of going public.

We are all aware of how it turned out: the richest man in the world spent $44 billion (£34.7 billion) to purchase it, which resulted in a huge payout for investors.

The future of Bluesky is still uncertain, but anything is possible if it keeps growing.

Article Link:https://www.bbc.com