How Bluesky, Twitter’s one-time side project, is challenging X

Billionaire Mark Cuban, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and author Stephen King are all now on Bluesky. The social media platform is the brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who conceived Bluesky as a side project inside Twitter in 2019. Bluesky, which is no longer affiliated with Dorsey, is now its own company, and following the U.S. election, the platform saw an influx of new users, most of who were looking to flee X. Bluesky now has over 28 million users, according to the company.

“The growth numbers for Bluesky are wild, and I think it’s really because there’s this vacuum being left by old Twitter,” says Meghana Dhar, a strategic advisor and former head of partnerships at Instagram and Snap Inc. “When Elon Musk took over Twitter and it kind of became X, things changed a lot, right? Content moderation changed. He changed the pricing options. So as he kind of navigated that transition, he lost a lot of people.”

“This is a platform that now seems to cater more pointedly toward right leaning or conservative users,” said Salvador Rodriguez, deputy tech editor at CNBC. “For folks who maybe don’t want to be presented with that kind of content so in their face, Bluesky is an area that, for all intents and purposes, the mechanisms are the same, but the vibe is completely different.”

Bluesky looks and feels a lot like old Twitter. Users can write short posts and include a photo or short video. They can also interact with others’ posts by commenting, liking or reposting. Users’ feeds consist of people they follow, as well as any other feeds they decide to subscribe to. But unlike conventional social media platforms, Bluesky is designed to be decentralized and give users a greater degree of control over their data and what content they do or don’t see.

“We don’t control what you see on Bluesky … There’s no single algorithm showing you things. You can browse a marketplace of algorithms built by other people. You can build your own algorithm if you want to see just cats or just art, you can do that,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said in an interview with CNBC in November. Bluesky also allows users to export out any of their posts, likes and followers to other platforms should they choose to leave Bluesky. Graber has said this makes the platform “billionaire-proof.”

Bluesky currently does not host ads, which is the business model of most social media platforms, but its leadership has not ruled that out as possibility in the future.

“I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization. We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you and locking users in,” Graber said. “That’s not our model. And so what we are going to do is give users better experiences, add new features, and then we’re doing a subscription model as well as services in the developer ecosystem. Because this isn’t just for users, this is for people who want to come build.”

But building a social media platform is no easy feat. Like many platforms before it, Bluesky has struggled with an increase of impersonator accounts and scammers as it’s grown. Bluesky recently said that users submitted 6.48 million reports to its moderation service in 2024, compared to 358,000 reports submitted in 2023. Watch the video to find out more about Bluesky’s impressive growth and the challenges facing the company in an increasingly fragmented social media market.