On Thursday evening, Bluesky announced that over 1 million people had signed up for the platform within the last 24 hours, marking one of the busiest days in the company’s history. This surge in new users pushed the social network’s total user base past the 16 million mark.
This announcement came just hours after Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed that Threads had garnered more than 15 million sign-ups in November alone. Mosseri also noted that the Meta-owned platform has been consistently attracting 1 million new sign-ups per day for the past three months.
However, Bluesky faced some initial challenges on Thursday as the service experienced downtime for some users. According to a Bluesky developer, the issue was caused by a cable problem with one of the company’s ISPs, compounded by other networking difficulties.
The decentralized social network has been experiencing a steady influx of users over the past few months, driven by various events such as X’s ban in Brazil, moderation issues on Threads, and the recent U.S. election results. X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by Elon Musk, has been criticized for promoting pro-Trump viewpoints in users’ algorithmic feeds.
Following the U.S. presidential election results, Bluesky reported that more than a million new users signed up on the platform within a week. As of the time of writing, the recent surge in sign-ups placed Bluesky at the top of the free apps chart on the U.S. App Store, followed by ChatGPT and Threads.
Despite its rapid growth, Bluesky remains much smaller overall compared to Threads, which boasts over 275 million active users, and X. However, Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber highlighted earlier this week that the platform has higher user engagement than X. “We also have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven’t dipped below ~30% posters,” she stated in a separate post.
Last month, Bluesky announced that it had raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode’s Amir Shevat, and Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda. On the product front, the company revealed plans to launch subscription services.
