Bluesky, the social network and X competitor, has been benefiting from a surge of departures from the Elon Musk-owned app formerly known as Twitter. Today, Bluesky has hit a major milestone: it’s topped 20 million users. What’s more, new data indicates the app’s rapid growth is seeing it close the gap with another prominent X rival, Instagram Threads, across metrics like daily active users and website visits.
Bluesky’s user base is still much smaller than Threads, which recently reported north of 275 million monthly active users. However, if Bluesky’s current rate of growth holds up, it could catch up with Threads in time, market intelligence firm Similarweb believes.
Its data indicates that Threads had five times more daily active users (DAUs) than Bluesky ahead of the U.S. elections, but on November 15, a peak day of activity for Bluesky, Threads’ lead over Bluesky had been reduced to just 1.5x in the U.S. (Daily active users include the mobile apps on iOS and Android, not website visitors.)
Instagram head Adam Mosseri denied Similarweb’s data is accurate, but Meta does not share DAUs.
The Musk-owned app X remains dominant, though, with a U.S. daily active user count that’s more than 10 times larger than Bluesky at present.
The firm’s data also indicates that Bluesky overtook Threads in daily website visits in both the U.S. and the U.K., which signals strong interest from potential new users. Globally, daily website visits on Bluesky haven’t yet surpassed Threads, but it’s come very close as of mid-November.
Adoption of the Bluesky mobile app is growing, as well, Similarweb reports. After the election and through November 15, usage of Bluesky’s app in the U.S. grew 519% compared with the first 10 months of the year, it said. The U.K. also saw a spike, with usage up by 352%.
On the U.S. App Store, Bluesky became the No. 1 app on November 13 and has not lost its position since, according to app intelligence provider Appfigures. That puts it ahead of Threads (No. 4) and X (No. 41). The App Store’s charts reward a combination of the number of installs and the pace of those installs, alongside other metrics, so this bump also has to do with Bluesky’s rate of growth, not just the sheer number of app downloads alone.
Globally (on Android devices), Bluesky app usage is up more than 360% from where it was in the first half of the year, the firm said. The pattern here looks different, as the influx of Brazilian users during the time when X was banned in Brazil led Bluesky’s daily active users on Android to skyrocket temporarily. (When the Brazil ban lifted, some may have returned to X, the data also suggests.)
Given that Bluesky only opened its doors to the public in February after a longer invite-only period, its growth has been remarkable. Bluesky has more than doubled its user base since September when the network had over 9 million users. Shortly after the U.S. presidential election, the app began gaining roughly 100,000 users per day, but that pace soon increased as the company announced on November 12 that it had added a million users over the past week. By November 13, Bluesky hit its last big milestone of 15 million users.
While Elon Musk’s use of X to campaign for President-elect Donald Trump is certainly fueling some of the departures, other Bluesky newcomers may have decided to leave X over other changes, like its decision to change how the blocking feature works or its new policy that allows it to sell user data to AI companies for training purposes.
Updated to include Adam Mosseri’s denial.
