Microblogging platform, Bluesky, is the hot new thing all of a sudden.
But we don’t mean hot like TikTok, with hundreds of millions of new Gen - Z users, because Bluesky hasn’t passed 25 million users yet. And it’s not exactly new either, since it’s been around for close to five years now.
No, this is a different kind of hot. This kind of hot is your favorite writers, journalists, academics, researchers, actors, artists, creators, comedians and other people of note all suddenly choosing to hang out there.
Bluesky hasn’t enjoyed the sheer explosion of user numbers that we’ve seen on apps like TikTok, but since November it’s seen a surge in popularity amongst the kind of people who have something interesting to say, and prefer to say it in pithy, short-form posts.
Since Twitter underwent significant changes following its sale in 2022, some users decided that it wasn’t the right platform for them any more, and began looking for an alternative with similar functionality. For a while, they were spoiled for choice, with lots of new microblogging platforms sprouting up and hoping to become serious rivals to Twitter.
Many of them withered on the vine, but a few managed to keep going long enough to attract a big enough user base to sustain them. Mastodon got a lot of attention as a potential Twitter alternative, but the user experience was just a bit too clunky and many people found it confusing. Current user numbers for Mastodon are around 10 million.
Threads, on the other hand, was everything you’d expect from Meta, slick, nicely designed, and easy to get to grips with. By integrating it lightly with Instagram, Meta was able to drive significant user growth, and the platform currently has 275 million users, making it the closer competitor to Twitter in terms of sheer volume.
That’s more than ten times the number of users that Bluesky currently has, so why are some people choosing Bluesky over Threads? Let’s look more closely at what the platform offers.
Table of Contents
What is Bluesky, exactly?
Why Do People Use Bluesky?
Who Created Bluesky?
Who Owns Bluesky?
Should Your Brand Join Bluesky?
What is Bluesky, exactly?
Bluesky is a micro-blogging platform where users can publish posts of up to 300 characters, along with images and videos. Your timeline offers a lot of different options, but at its most basic you can choose a simple feed of the most recent posts from the accounts you follow in reverse chronological order, just like things used to be in the early days of social media. This simplicity is popular among a lot of users who don’t like the new era of algorithm-driven timelines.
There’s also the Discover timeline (or Feed, as they’re called on Bluesky) which uses an algorithm to suggest stuff it thinks you’ll be interested in. But one of the clever things about Bluesky is that anybody can create a custom Feed, based on their own algorithm, which can be shared with other users. There’s the What’s Hot feed which shows popular content, the BookSky feed for people who love reading, the Popular With Friends feed that shows you content that was liked by the people you follow, and hundreds more covering a wide variety of topics.
You can select which Feeds to add to your profile, and easily swipe between them. When you open the app (web or mobile) it defaults to whichever feed you were looking at the last time you used the app. There’s also a lot of flexibility in how replies, threads, reposts and quote-posts are displayed in your timelines, so you can easily set things up just the way you like.
Hashtags can be used to signify that a post is relevant to a particular topic, and clicking a hashtag will show you all other posts that use it, which can be sorted by popularity or recency.
Bluesky has recently added a beta version of its Trending Topics system to help you discover the big discussion points of the day, but it's still quite rudimentary and of limited use.
Account profiles are straight-forward - you get a profile picture, banner image, a display name that doesn’t have to be your real name, and a 256 character bio. You can set up multiple profiles that can be managed from the same account, which is useful if you want to keep a professional and personal account separate but easily accessible.
There’s no blue-tick style verification system, but anybody who owns a web domain name can easily configure Bluesky to use their domain name as their Bluesky handle. For example, Netflix uses the handle @netflix.com. This works as a de-facto verification system because only the owner of a domain name can perform the necessary setup to use it as their Bluesky profile name.
Why Do People Use Bluesky?
Bluesky feels much closer to the original Twitter user experience, whereas Threads has a very different look and feel. But more importantly, although much harder to quantify, the vibe is just different.
Threads grew very quickly by driving users across from Instagram, and the community which developed there can feel like an extension of Instagram. That’s not to say it isn’t a fun place to spend time, and there are lots of high-profile accounts on Threads that help make it an entertaining social media experience, but for anybody who spent a long time on Twitter, it just isn’t the same.
Even though Twitter didn’t migrate users to Bluesky, the two platforms are cut from the same cloth, and that’s immediately apparent when you start using Bluesky, both in terms of the interface and the kind of community it has attracted. On Bluesky, you’re more likely to find historians and authors chatting and joking with each other about a big news story, for example, while on Threads you’re more likely to see big-brand accounts jumping on viral trends.
If Instagram is a fashionable nightclub, then Threads is a raucous bar, and Bluesky is a dinner party full of people you find really interesting.
One of the things that really helps create this kind of environment on Bluesky is “Starter Packs” which are curated lists of accounts that anybody can build, and they’re usually focused on a specific area of interest. Whether you’re into history, current affairs, science, standup comedy, or whatever else, there’s a good chance that some kind Bluesky has already built a Starter Pack featuring all the best profiles for you to follow.
This helps new users immediately start getting value from the platform, because you don’t have to spend a lot of time looking for profiles that match your interests. This means new users aren’t faced with a barren timeline, which is one of the main challenges of convincing people to continue using a social media site after they set up an account, and they instantly feel like there’s an interesting community to participate in.
Who Created Bluesky?
In 2019 Bluesky started life as an internal project at Twitter, with the aim of building a decentralized social media platform. This was born out of a recognition that, while Twitter was becoming a valuable and popular communications channel for sharing live, real-time updates with the world, the fact that it was owned and operated by a single organization made it vulnerable.
A decentralized Twitter-like platform would work more like the Internet itself, built on open-source protocols which allow the overall network to continue working if one part of it fails, or even if a particular platform, such as Bluesky itself, were to collapse.
The result of this project was the AT Protocol, an open-source social networking standard which would allow users to easily move all of their data (profile, content, connections) between different platforms, and for developers to build a more robust, decentralized social-web. Bluesky itself was built as a proof-of-concept for the AT Protocol, to show that it could work.
As of 2024, the AT Protocol is still under active development and has not yet been broadly adopted outside of Bluesky itself. But that hasn’t stopped Bluesky from attracting a lot of attention and a steadily growing user base.
Who Owns Bluesky?
In 2021 Bluesky was spun out from Twitter as Bluesky Social PBC, an independent Public Benefit Company which is a specific type of business where directors are not only accountable to their shareholders, but are also required to make a positive impact on society. The company is now owned by CEO, Jay Graber, and several other employees. In Bluesky’s case, its stated social mission is to “develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.”
Should Your Brand Join Bluesky?
If you’re a brand social media manager wondering whether it’s worth investing resources in Bluesky, there’s no real reason not to start experimenting with it. If you’re already creating content for X/Twitter or Threads, then it’s going to be very easy to simply repurpose that content for Bluesky.
While there might be some additional work involved in community management on the platform, the relatively low user numbers mean that should be minimal for the time being. As the platform grows, you can make a value judgement about whether any increase in reach and engagement it offers is a worthwhile return on investment.
At the moment, not many brands are active on Bluesky, so there's a good chance that early adopters can make an impact and build a following among the platform's fans.
