Twitter alternative Bluesky is on the rise (gently).Image: trapezoid
The Bluesky app, an alternative to Elon Musk's online Platform X, has experienced a growth spurt since the U.S. presidential election. The company told technology blog The Verge that it added 700,000 users last week alone. Most of them are from the United States.
Over the past few days, a number of prominent X users have announced that they are leaving the platform due to negative developments under Musk's leadership.
How many users does Bluesky and X have?
Bluesky currently has 14.5 million users, so it's still significantly smaller than X. The service was once acquired by Musk as Twitter, but may have hundreds of millions of users. The tech billionaire didn't give an exact figure.
However, Bluesky has so far found it difficult to grow its user base. The service still had 4 million users in February. X passed the 10 million mark in mid-September after Brazil was temporarily locked down.
Is there something wrong with X?
Tech billionaire and Tesla boss Elon Musk is an active supporter of Donald Trump and has become a close confidant of the US president-elect. In X, he repealed previous measures targeting misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The social media platform is now considered a slingshot of disinformation, being abused for its own purposes, particularly by Russian actors.
Musk himself has on numerous occasions spread right-wing extremist conspiracy theories and fake news, among other things, and has brought notorious neo-Nazis, racists and misogynists back to his platform.
In the European Union, an investigation found several violations by platform operators that could result in hefty fines. X has been accused of a lack of transparency and failures in content and ad moderation.
Who is behind Blue Sky?
Bluesky is an initiative based on the former Twitter CEO Jack Dorseyback up. In 2019, he announced the news on Twitter. Parag Agrawal, an Indian computer scientist who served as Twitter's chief technology officer and later CEO, invited the first members to join the Bluesky working group in 2020. The group later expanded to include representatives from ActivityPub and Mastodon.
Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone (from left).Screenshot: Twitter
ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social network protocol released in 2018 and managed by the Internet Consortium W3C. It forms the basis for connecting social media services. For example, users of the independent social media service Mastodon can also follow posts from the “Threads” service, which is part of Instagram (Meta Group).
(dsc/sda/awp/dpa)
The most important terms about Mastodon and Fediverse
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The most important terms about Mastodon and Fediverse
Forget Twitter! These terms about European social media alternative Mastodon aren't just making Elon Musk sweat…
Source: Keystone/Gregory Bull
What is a thread?
Video: Watson
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