The Bluesky social network, whose operation is very similar to that of X (formerly Twitter), should exceed the symbolic milestone of 20 million users in the coming hours, at the end of a week of strong growth. Launched in 2021 independently, after being developed as an internal Twitter project, the platform had until now not recorded a notable peak in activity. But since November 6, it has seen a significant number of registrations, increasing from 40,000 to around a million per day recently, showing 11 million monthly active users.
This recent growth is particularly marked in the United States, where Bluesky is at the top of the ranking of the most downloaded free applications on the Apple store and the Google Play Store. It is also very important “in Canada and the United Kingdom”according to a Bluesky spokesperson cited by NBC News. In France, the application was on Monday noon on the 9the place of the same ranking on the App Store, and the 27e place on the Play Store.
However, Bluesky's usage figures remain modest, compared to those of its main competitors. Threads (Meta group) claims 275 million monthly active users; X no longer publishes detailed figures on a regular basis since its acquisition by Elon Musk, but claimed to have nearly 400 million last year.
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Some users are deserting
For three months, Bluesky has benefited from a growth dynamic which seems linked to the figure of Elon Musk and American political news. The platform thus experienced a first historic peak of activity at the end of August, when X was blocked in Brazil, by court decision: in four days, 2.4 million Brazilians had created an account Bluesky. The social network's statistics, which are public, show an even greater explosion in the number of registrations from November 12, when the administration of Donald Trump confirmed that Elon Musk would be named in charge of a mission cuts in the budgets of the American administration.
This growth of Bluesky is coupled with a limited but notable exodus of X users. While the site experienced a peak in activity during the American election campaign, 115,000 people deactivated their X accounts on November 13 – a record, according to the company Similarweb. Last week, the influential British daily The Guardian announced that it would stop posting messages on X, believing that it was now a platform ” toxic “and at the same time opened an account on Bluesky.
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