After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections, the number of users, mainly Americans, of the social network X, owned by Elon Musk, who this year became one of the people closest to the future tenant from the White House, began to decline noticeably.
Meanwhile, X’s competitor, the Bluesky platform, created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is seeing a significant increase in new users.
Since November 6, the number of accounts on the social network has grown daily, now exceeding 17 million. This Thursday alone, more than a million people joined the platform.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky has existed since 2019, but until February of this year, users could only register by invitation.
It is a decentralized microblogging social network based on an open protocol called ‘Authenticated Transfer Protocol’ (AT Protocol). That is, users and developers have more options to customize and manage the network. Users can choose custom algorithms that determine the type of posts that appear on their screen.
According to its website, the platform “was designed not to be controlled by a single company.”
However, many of Bluesky’s features are similar to those of X: it allows users to create text messages with a limit of 256 characters, which can also contain images and videos, share and reply to other users’ posts.
At the same time, Bluesky users can block each other, while one of the X changes allows a user to see posts from someone who has blocked them.
Furthermore, at the moment the platform does not have advertising and has no intention of including it in the future.
Why do users abandon X?
Although Users deactivated their accounts, the highest number since tycoon Elon Musk bought the platform.
Users explain that, after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and changes to the content moderation system in favor of freedom of expression, X has become a “toxic media platform” with a high level of bots, misinformation and an increase in offensive posts.
In addition, some report that the network’s algorithms promote posts with far-right narratives and the agenda of Donald Trump, whom Musk supports.
Social media researcher Axel Bruns told The Guardian that Bluesky, for its part, offers an alternative to X with a more effective system for combating problematic accounts and monitoring offensive behavior.
“It has become a haven for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to offer, but without all the far-right activism, misinformation, hate speech, bots and everything else,” he said, adding that the more liberal community of X “has really escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.”
At the same time, it is worth remembering that the old Twitter, led by Dorsey, with its strict moderation, was not impartial and promoted narratives from the leaders of the Democratic Party.
For example, internal company documents, published by Musk after his purchase, revealed that US intelligence agencies had required the platform to censor topics that went against the narrative promoted by Washington, such as the story about the information present on the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the current US president, in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential elections.
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