What Is Bluesky, How Does It Work And Why Are Users Leaving Elon Musk's X

Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) is undergoing a mass exodus (X-odus on social media) as nearly a million users have joined rival social media platform Bluesky after the conclusion of the US presidential elections. A host of journalists, actors, musicians and other prominent people have dumped X with Bluesky stating it had topped the app download charts on Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store in the US. As of the last update, the platform boasts of 19 million users, compared to only 10 million in early September.

Why are users migrating to Bluesky?

After Mr Musk announced his complete support for Donald Trump's presidential campaign and even formed a super PAC that spent almost $200 million on the canvassing trail -- a significant number of X users announced that they would leave the platform if the Republican leader came to power.

Two days before the mass migration began, President-elect Trump announced that Mr Musk would be in his cabinet, co-leading the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. The decision did not go down well with a section of users who believe that X might become an echo chamber of right-wing voices.

Some users have taken their business to Bluesky for non-political reasons as well. A recent update to X's terms and conditions policy, which took effect on November 15, allows the platform to use posts, photos and videos, even from private accounts to train Grok -- an AI chatbot model.

"You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide...for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type," the terms say under the section about users' rights.

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What is Bluesky?

Bluesky started as an internal project by former X CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019. Initially an invitation-only platform, Bluesky was opened to the public in February of the same year before becoming an independent company with Jay Graber as its CEO in 2021.

bluesky's user count grew by another million today

welcome to all 19M of you 🥳https://t.co/x6v5YW0WFT pic.twitter.com/FtCvcyyr20

— bluesky (@bluesky) November 18, 2024

Is Bluesky different to X?

In theory, Bluesky allows users to customise their feed by choosing the algorithm that drives what they see. It allows users to have website addresses as their handles which makes the interactions authentic as opposed to the swarm of bots on X. Additionally, it could act as a verification tool for public figures, athletes and journalists.

Can Bluesky cope with the deluge?

Last week, the Bluesky team stated that it had received 42,000 moderation reports in the last 24 hours (versus 360,000 in all of 2023). The Bluesky team said it was working to hire new members and requested users to help by reporting troll, spam, and scam accounts. Bluesky has also implemented email verification for new signups.