Traffic on Bluesky, an X competitor, is up 500% since the election. How will they handle the surge? : NPR

The day after the presidential election, the social media landscape shook.

On Elon Musk’s X, more than 115,000 users deactivated their accounts, the largest-ever mass exit from the platform. At the same time, traffic on Bluesky, a smaller rival to X, began to soar, with daily usage climbing some 500% in the U.S., according to data from Similarweb.

“We’ve been growing by about a million users a day for several days,” said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in an interview with NPR on Monday. “It’s proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they’ll have a better time.”

Putting more control in the hands of users is what distinguishes Bluesky from X, formerly Twitter, and other rival social media sites.

Rather than having one “master algorithm,” Bluesky allows for a more personalized experience. By default, there are three main feeds: One shows accounts you follow, another shows what your friends follow and a “discover” feed surfaces posts linked to your interests.

Bluesky allows users to reach beyond these three by developing their own customized algorithm for, say, just content about cats, or only posts about a sports team or type of music. Because of this customization, Graber says there are more than 50,000 different Bluesky feeds available.

And Bluesky, she argues, is “billionaire-proof,” since the company is not one centralized feed of content, but rather a “protocol” from which endless feeds can be created. Think of a protocol like email, or the internet itself, Graber says. It would be difficult for a single person or company to control it, since the underlying technology is open-sourced and maintained by many contributors, like Wikipedia.

“My concern with the internet is it’s just too controlled by a few powerful interests, and people don’t have the ability to control their own fate, so we wanted to build social [media] that’s built by the people, for the people,” Graber said.

Since Musk took over Twitter two years ago, the site has collapsed content guardrails, laid off more than 80% of employees and turned the site’s verification badges into a pay-to-play system where users can pay to amplify the reach of their posts. In the months leading up to the election, Musk, a major Trump donor, surrogate and now White House advisorhas used the platform to boost his support of the former president and promote right-wing views.

That, in turn, has led to a mass exodus — also dubbed the “X-odus.” For many, Bluesky has become a refuge.

While Bluesky’s utopian vision may sound appealing to those fed up with how Musk-promoting and partisan X has become, it is still a relatively tiny app, surpassing 20 million users on Tuesday, compared with the hundreds of millions on X and Meta-owned Threads, or the billions of users on Instagram and TikTok.

Analysts say Bluesky has also benefited from user frustration with other text-based social media apps. Threads, for example, has nearly 300 million monthly active users, benefitting from having built on top of Instagram, but Meta has de-emphasized news and politics from its social networks. That’s led users to complain about Threads being full of days-old posts and “engagement bait,” or purposefully controversial or outrage-inducing posts aimed at drawing responses.

Germany-based Mastodon, another X rival, requires users to navigate its many servers, known as “instances,” that make up its decentralized system. Confused yet? Some users are, and have given up before even starting. But others have stuck with it, resulting in a 50% bump in app downloads in the last month.

While Hollywood actors, politicians and some journalists have flocked to Bluesky, overall, it’s a relatively small community. It still has a scrappy upstart vibe to it, which fans say is part of its charm.

But social media researchers say major problems, like harassment, hate speech and misinformation, tend to flood platforms when any social media site gets large enough. In other words, the site may be in something of a sweet spot right now, but with more growth will come plenty of headaches.

“It’s small and you can curate a list of people who you find interesting and funny. It feels like Twitter from a decade ago,” said Dave Karpf, a media and public affairs professor at George Washington University and an early Bluesky adopter.

“It takes out the algorithmic, ‘The computer is going to tell you what you want and you better want it,'” Karpf said. “Instead, you pick who you want to talk and listen to and talk to them.”

It operates with a shoestring staff. In the wake of the election, as Bluesky’s full-time employees of 20 people worked around the clock to handle the rush of new users, its systems became, at times, rickety. The site wasn’t loading correctly for many and users reported other glitches, as the company adjusted to all the new interest.

“We had a bit of a rocky patch,” Graber said. “But that’s to be expected from being in the spotlight and getting so much growth.”

Jack Dorsey helped launch it, but he’s cut ties

Bluesky was originally a project backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who in 2019 announced that Twitter would fund a “decentralized” social network that is not controlled by one person or company.

Around that time, Dorsey and other cryptocurrency enthusiasts were promoting a new vision of the future of the internet known as Web3which was aimed at dismantling Big Tech’s “walled gardens,” or social networks and services run by individual companies, where accounts cannot leave and travel to another social network.

This vision often includes harnessing so-called blockchains, the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which is decentralized. In other words, no single entity has power over the system.

Dorsey tapped technologist Graber, now 33, to lead Bluesky. It became a public benefit corporation, a type of for-profit organization intended to place societal benefit over shareholder returns.

Bluesky started as an invite-only social media site. Earlier this year, it opened to the public.

Dorsey, has since cut ties with Bluesky and left its board, saying in an interview with venture capitalist Mike Solana that its speech rules were against his original vision of a site in which content is not policed in any way by moderators. Dorsey is now pushing an even smaller and more niche social media upstart known as Nostr, which describes itself as a “censorship-resistant” open source social network.

Bluesky CEO Graber said she has not heard from Dorsey in months.

“Jack [Dorsey] hasn’t been involved since he left the board,” Graber said. “And even when he was involved, he was not super involved.”

Dorsey, Musk and X did not return requests for comment.

No ads, no data mining. So how to survive?

Bluesky was launched with a grant from Twitter when Dorsey first announced the project, but it has never had any advertisements, which is how the vast majority of social media sites are funded. Officials at Bluesky say it has no plans of ever relying on ads.

Last month, Bluesky announced an additional round of venture capital funding, yet has never revealed a long-term way to make money.

Rose Wang, Bluesky’s chief operating officer, wrote in a post around the time of the new fundraising round that the company is working on a subscription model that will give users “premium” features, like the ability to upload higher-quality videos and customize profiles with avatars and new colors.

“Paid subscribers won’t get special treatment elsewhere in the app,” Wang wrote. “We won’t sell your data.”

The company doubled down on this promise last week, vowing to never tap user data to train artificial intelligence models.

Karpf said Bluesky is showing that it is charting a different path as a social media company, but, eventually, it will have to devise a way to pay its bills if it wants to keep expanding.

“It’s pretty cheap to run overall,” Karpf said. “But with all that growth, eventually they need to figure out: All right, how do we pay for the service? How do we pay our employees? How do we sustain this growth?”