Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky Social gains 800k users in just one day, crosses 4-mn mark

Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky Social opened its doors to the public after a year of being in the invite-only phase, and it is safe to say that it is piquing users’ curiosity. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of X (formerly Twitter), decentralized platforms have grown in popularity, courtesy of those who have been disappointed by the myriad of changes rolled out on X. Although it was in an invite-only beta stage, Bluesky Social enjoyed a massive bump in popularity as it crossed 2 million users in November 2023. Now that it is accessible to the public without requiring any invite, users have flocked to Bluesky Social.

Increase in Bluesky Social users

According to data that is publicly available, Bluesky Social gained 800,000 users (or “newskies”) on the first day itself. The microblogging platform crossed the 4 million user mark for the first time ever, and it currently has over 4.2 million users. This is despite facing outages on day one of being open to the public. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber admitted that the platform faced “ intermittent feed outages”, but the issues seem to have been resolved.

What is Bluesky Social?

BlueSky Social is a decentralized social media app developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Jay Graber serves as the CEO. The platform is built using an open-source framework using the proprietary AT protocol which is a transparent network allowing users to see how it is built and what's in development.

The “decentralized' platform of the app means that all the data is stored on independent servers instead of servers owned by the company. Moreover, users can create their own servers and switch to them, without losing any data, according to Graber.

How is it different from X?

The main difference between BlueSky Social and X is when it comes to moderation. The social media platform has composable moderation policies with the help of third-party providers. Although it will use an automated filtering system, the platform will also enable Community labelling, allowing users to manually label things. Fear is being expressed in many quarters that this will promote misinformation on the platform.

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