You may have seen the word “Bluesky” popping up on your social media pages recently and wondered what people are talking about.
It is an alternative platform to Elon Musk’s X and in terms of its colour and logo, it looks quite similar.
Bluesky is growing rapidly and is currently picking up around one million new sign-ups a day.
It had 16.7m users at the time of writing, but that figure will likely be outdated by the time you read this.
So what is it – and why are so many people joining?
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky describes itself as “social media as it should be”, although it looks similar to other sites.
Visually, a bar to the left of the page shows everything you might expect – search, notifications, a homepage and so on.
People using the platform can post, comment, repost and like their favourite things.
To put it simply, it looks how X, formerly known as Twitter, used to look.
The main difference is Bluesky is decentralised – a complicated term which basically means users can host their data on servers other than those owned by the company.
This means that rather than being limited to having a specific account named after Bluesky, people can (if they like) sign up using an account they themselves own.
But it is worth stating that the vast majority of people don’t do that and a new joiner will most likely have a “.bsky.social” at the end of their username.
Who owns Bluesky?
If you think it feels a lot like X, you won’t be surprised to learn why. The former head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, created it.
He even once said he wanted Bluesky to be a decentralised version of Twitter that no single person or entity owns.
But Mr Dorsey is no longer part of the team behind it, having stepped down from the board in May 2024.
He deleted his account altogether in September.
It is now run and predominantly owned by chief executive Jay Graber as a US public benefit corporation.
Why is it gaining in popularity?
Bluesky has been around since 2019, but it was invitation-only until February of this year.
That let the developers deal with all the kinks behind-the-scenes, to try and stabilise it before opening the doors to the wider public.
The plan has worked, somewhat. But the flurry of new users has been so significant in November that there continue to be issues with outages.