In November 2024, when Trump won his second presidential bid, a wave of anxiety across America proved opportune for a burgeoning company. Bluesky saw a 500% surge in new sign-ups, reaching roughly 2.5 million active users on the microblogging platform at the time. It had also raised $15 million in that period ($100 million to date), buoyed in part by its open, “federated” infrastructure, which lets users control their feeds, move their identities across platforms, and sidestep centralized moderation. Mark Cuban called Bluesky a “less hateful world” on the app at the time, while media scholars hailed it as a “compelling alternative” to X.
But by the end of 2025, the app’s user base took a nosedive. About 40% fewer active users were reportedly posting to Bluesky, and today the number continues to flatten (if not decline).
Once lauded as the heroic anti-X, a more principled and moralistic Twitterverse, Bluesky now appears to be struggling to retain users and build a sustainable, competitive business model. Its identity as an alternative to Twitter drew in waves of oppositional voices, often labeled “Resistance Twitter,” but that positioning may now be its biggest hurdle. Some of its most vocal, self-identified neoliberal users have helped create an echo chamber that can stifle discourse, at times driving prolific journalists off the platform. And experts in decentralized microblogging say Bluesky is running into a familiar problem from Twitter’s early days: how to grow and generate revenue without undermining the authenticity of the user experience.
It’s a tricky problem, one with a few possible fixes, according to industry experts, and a familiar one in the digital age. Bluesky arrived with real momentum and promise. It still meets a clear need on the internet: a decentralized, discourse-driven space with rules meant to curb bad-faith behavior like hate speech and spam. Its timing helped. The platform launched into a moment when Elon Musk had just acquired Twitter, renamed it X, and reshaped it into a more chaotic, anything-goes environment.
And that chaos hasn’t disappeared. Misinformation and low-quality AI slop circulate on X every day. Yet the platform, for all its flaws, still offers up an interesting array of jokes and commentary—the sort of context mix Bluesky has struggled to replicate.
In need of normies?
Bluesky had, and arguably has, promise. And “good” intentions, if it’s even appropriate to apply that framework for any for-profit tech company. The app first began as an experiment slash research project by the then-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey in 2019. Dorsey said he wanted to create an “open and decentralized” social media that would give users more control over their data, and that he believed in content moderation when it came to hate speech, slop, and misinformation. A distinctive stance that Musk actively neglects on X, if he’s not deliberately fanning every day. In 2021, the company brought on software engineer Jay Graber as CEO. But Graber has recently stepped down, creating more fission and uncertainty for the company. (Bluesky did respond to a request for comment.)
At the height of anti–far right sentiment leading up to the 2024 election, amid a loud backlash against Musk and the perceived deterioration of X, Bluesky started to feel like a kind of promiseland. It became, for many, a version of “the future liberals want,” a space where users with strong left-leaning politics could gather and thrive. When Trump was declared the winner, frustrated Twitter users directed their attention and energy to Bluesky, and almost overnight it began to feel like a new Twitter, or a more orderly version of Liberal Twitter. Sure, there were other alternatives, like Threads and Mastodon, but Bluesky moved faster in capturing both credibility and hype. Creators, journalists, academics, and other power users from X put in the work early, cross-posting and urging their followers to migrate. Many saw immediate traction.
A number of people who were once prolific posters on X say they now prefer Bluesky, in part because they trust that most users are real and that interactions feel more authentic. “I like that Bluesky has real people on it, and the people are, in general, more positive and joyful than those on Twitter,” says Ed Zitron, a writer and podcaster with over 175,000 followers. “They talk about things they like, they get excited about stuff, they riff, they commiserate, they actually have some community. It’s nice.”
Zitron says he hasn’t had many negative experiences, especially compared with Twitter. And when backlash does come, he doesn’t dwell on it, seeing it as a normal part of any conversation-driven platform. “I think it’s easy to say, ‘well I saw this time where someone got attacked,’ and generalize, but you can point to that happening on any social network.”
Another power user, a journalist with tens of thousands of followers who wished to remain anonymous, noted something similar. “It’s by far the friendliest platform to reporters, just structurally, because it doesn’t throttle links,” she says, in that it doesn’t deprioritize or penalize external links like many other micro-blogging mediums do. “Threads, X, IG, TikTok, all of these platforms are so bad for getting people to read your work. People on Bluesky want to amplify news and want to read it.”
She notes, though, that Bluesky is not “normie enough,” in that it often feels shaped by the loudest voices, many of them indignant about their causes du jour. Its most active posters are still journalists, scholars, or “Resistance Twitter” pack leaders. The “normies” among your friends, colleagues, and neighbors in everyday life are likely not on Bluesky yet. Without them, the culture and values on the site can feel disproportionately representative. And, as we know with litigating complex socio-political issues with others in our real lives, there is a lot more diversity and friction. In my opinion, and one that’s shared by many studies and scholars, we need ideological checks and balances to keep our own dogmatic frameworks sharp and current. Even irreverent jokes about serious current affairs helps to break up the tonal steering and policing.
That dynamic is not unique to Bluesky. All microblogging platforms contend with a small group of loud users dominating the tone. But because Bluesky has struggled to grow its user base, the effect can feel especially constricting. The platform can seem narrow not just ideologically but socially, with too few highly active posters generating the energy and unpredictability that make these networks feel alive. That sense of thin activity shows up in the data: According to a 2025 analysis from the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of so-called news influencers on Bluesky post infrequently, whereas 83% posted on X at least four times per week.
Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media at Carnegie Mellon University who’s been studying Twitter alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon with his students, says “click-based behavior” is creating this teeming of singular discourses.
“We see it on every social network: You have folks aligning across ideological concepts following each other and directing each other to different posts that might negate an opinion to the group.,” he says “Could you call it cultish? Not sure, but we’re seeing more of it.”
That dynamic can escalate quickly in practice. Late last month, Mark Stern, a SCOTUS reporter for Slate, announced he was going to stop posting to Bluesky after one of his posts was seemingly misinterpreted for being pro-conversion therapy. (In fact, he was merely contextualizing a Supreme Court ruling.) Fervid Bluesky users harassed, dog-piled and successfully ran him off the platform. “I am going to stop summarizing Supreme Court decisions on here as they come down. One comment has been plucked out of context of all my reporting, misread, and used as the basis of a mean-spirited pile-on. I am not going to subject myself to this. If this was your goal, then congratulations,” Stern posted on March 31. (Stern did not respond to a request for comment.)
This aggressive and yet overly earnest “pie in the sky” approach to ideological hominy is what’s making it unenjoyable today, experts say. “I had the same thing happen on Bluesky,” says Lightman, in response to the mob that attacked Stern. “I posted something that in my opinion I felt strongly about, and a bunch of people tried to lecture me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I was like, ‘Holy crap, it’s happening again.’ It drives people away from the platform.”
Adventures in AI
The other hurdle for Bluesky is building a financially viable business model that doesn’t compromise its core values. Twitter faced it in its early days, too: How does it get advertisers or its users to pay for it?
With direct advertising, it may run the risk of creating more spam content and infringing on its ethos and image as a native, user-first place. Recalibrating its algorithm to surface more like-minded content to keep users hooked (the X approach) could also alienate its most devoted users, who hate that aspect of X. “Advertising, algorithmic feeds, these are all things Bluesky has vocally said that they’re not going to do [so] they kind of painted themselves in a corner,” says Ben Pettis, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Richmond. “They can go donation-based, but I’m not sure they’ll be able to sustain themselves with it.”
Pettis also suggested bringing notable influencers on the platform, the way Threads and Substack have approached marketing, but he then noted that it might also run counter to Bluesky’s brand: “If companies were to court influencers, my sense is a lot of people would be aware of what’s going on, they might feel it’s inauthentic.”
Pettis and Lightman both stressed how difficult this quandary is to solve for all microblogging sites, not exclusive to Bluesky. But the singular problem for Bluesky, by being billed as the utopian anti-Twitter ecosystem, is the cultural and business bind that they’re in that seems to account for its waning activity. “You end up with a core contradiction when you make an online place that’s good for people but it’s not good for business,” Pettis added. (Bluesky did not respond to my request for comment.)
In its latest bid to stay relevant, Bluesky launched its own AI tool, called Attie, but it seemed to prompt immediate recoil, even disgust. Many users complained that AI is not what they want or need. In a curt response to a user who expressed this exact sentiment, Graber wrote, “then don’t use it—it’s a separate app.” She then reposted a user who said that the “willful blindness about AI” from those “on the left,” about wanting total dissolution of AI, is shortsighted.
The clash between Bluesky leadership and its users over AI integration is not surprising, given the company once took a fairly firm stance against it. While most companies are rushing to adopt or keep up with AI tech, perhaps also willfully and blindly at times, Bluesky’s stark shift from its original ethos suggests the company may be doing everything it can to remain viable.
Still, regular Bluesky users seem to enjoy enough of the anti-Twitter features and protections it offers. And the hard truth all social media and tech companies must face is that they have to prioritize user experience above all. That should include a firm, disciplined stance against misinformation and hate speech, while also allowing for a diversity of speech and thought necessary to foster a smart, enriching place for online discourse. I prefer this response
But where Bluesky may lack an ideological edge, it does have something that is increasingly rare these days: real human users. While exact metrics or studies showing that most accounts on Bluesky are verified and run by real people are hard to come by, nearly everyone I spoke with pointed to this as the platform’s most redeeming quality, especially compared with X, Mastodon, or Threads. The company is also particularly proud of its efforts to eliminate bots and build stronger verification layers.
“The biggest difference is that I can say for certain that the majority of people responding are… actual people?” says Zitron. “This wasn’t always novel.”
