👉 Background: BlueSky is a social media platform where people can interact in pretty much the exact same way as they do on X, formerly known as Twitter. It actually began as a project within the walls of Twitter by Jack Dorsey - Twitter’s founder and CEO at the time. In 2021, pre-Musky’s acquisition, BlueSky was spun out of Twitter.

👉 What happened: In early September 2024, BlueSky had just 9 million users. But now, BlueSky has crossed over 20 million users as many X users departed the platform. Millions of X users have defected to BlueSky after it was reported that X promoted pro-Trump viewpoints in their users’ algorithmic feeds during the election lead-up.

👉 What else: The main reasons for the shift over to BlueSky have been:

• X promoting pro-Trump viewpoints in their users’ algorithmic feeds during the election lead-up.
• X's new policy to sell user data to AI companies for training purposes

And BlueSky is picking up the slack as it is effectively a decentralised version of Twitter.

What's the key learning?

💡In a world where big companies control almost everything, decentralisation could be the key to giving power back to the people.

💡Traditional, centralised platforms like X decide what gets posted, who sees it, and how your data is used. But being a decentralised platform means that no single person or company owns or controls. Instead, it allows users to have more control over their content and how it’s shared.

💡Not only are users moving to BlueSky, but they're actually using BlueSky as well. Get this: most social platforms have got only 1% of users posting, but BlueSky claims that 30% of its users are posting right now.

So while BlueSky’s total number of users is a fraction of X, it’s hoping that its engaged community will be all the difference.