If 2023 is Year
Twitter is among those touted as a potential decentralized social network. The principle behind decentralization will allow social media to behave more like email; you can choose your provider and chat in the same way. Bluesky launched as a public interest LLP in 2021 and raised $8 million in a July 2023 funding round.
When it first emerged as a potential lifeboat for disgruntled Twitter users in April 2023, I thought it had echoes of Twitter’s early days. At that point the platform had 50,000 users.
Today, Bluesky’s user base stands at 2.6 million: a 5,100% increase – remarkable given that the service is invite-only as of now – but still the same as Musk-era X (225 million monthly users) and Meta’s Threads It is far behind . hastily launched proxy (141 million users to date). Still, Bluesky ranks last among the proposed “Twitter killers” (remember T2?), and its CEO, Jay Graber, has bigger plans than just acquiring users. “Next year,” says Graber, “basically anyone can run a service, then talk to ours and connect to it.”
“It’s been a crazy year,” Graber (who uses they/them pronouns) tells Fast Company. “We started this year by going into beta in the spring. And now we’re up to 2.6 million users. So there’s been a lot of growth.”
But to compete with X, the platform needs to grow even further. And the question is: Will Bluesky’s growth be too little, too late?
“I think Bluesky is moving too slowly,” says social media consultant Matt Navarra. “It remains in exclusive mode, limited rollout, and beta.” He explains that this impacts the transition for the average user. “[Bluesky] potentially missed a huge opportunity presented by the competitive landscape for other similar platforms as well as the helix of the X.”
Navarra acknowledges that replacing X Wholesale may never have been Bluesky’s goal. “Is Bluesky’s goal a platform with a few hundred million users or even a platform with billions of users? Or is this not our desire, then perhaps there is no failure in any respect.”
Navarra thinks this uncertainty rubs off on users, who avoid embracing it seriously as X begins to change. Navarra thinks the lack of branding also means Bluesky can’t capitalize on users’ desire to find an alternative home. “I don’t think it has a distinctive personality as a brand or a platform,” he says. “[There’s] nothing that you can clearly identify as a set of traits or personality or something that sets it apart when you look at Instagram, TikTok, BeReal, or even Threads.”
This is something the Bluesky team admits is a weakness. “I think there is a lot of communication that needs to be done and shown to people,” Graber says.
Rose Wang works on strategy and operations for Bluesky. “2.6 million happened when we gave an interview,” she says. “We basically did no proactive outreach. I think part of it comes down to communication: We just have to get out there and tell our story.
Bluesky still struggles to explain to the average person what sets its product apart from other microblogging platforms. Graber comes closer and says they hope Bluesky will ensure that “users have choice, developers have the freedom to develop, and creators have control over their relationship with their audiences,” but then says that’s something people will see when they get their hands on it.
Wang admits: “People inspiration,” he says, and Bluesky needs to better explain what is different. “I think the federation is very confusing to people,” he says. “So it’s about showing them what the universe could look like. “We have so much more to do next year.” Of course, some people joined Bluesky precisely because of its ideology of reimagining social media.
One thing the Bluesky team hopes will help its standing in 2024 is the upcoming release of open federations that will allow anyone to launch a service that can talk to Bluesky. The open federations follow this week’s announcement of a public web interface that means links embedded in Bluesky posts on the web will be visible to anyone.
This can help Bluesky grow more; something that was necessarily disrupted at the height of the Twitter panic. Then, as now, the service was invite-only because the team had to carefully manage user flow to avoid overwhelming the team or crashing the trial. “As soon as we put together a waiting list that we had created a client, which we hadn’t said before – we were just saying we were creating a protocol – we had over a million sign-ups in a matter of days,” says Graber. “So we started taking this much more seriously and working harder.”
Whether it will work remains to be seen. “While we’ve made the platform a little bit special by using a recommendation system, the fact remains that it’s an exclusive club with very few cool people the rest of us want to hang out with,” says Steven Buckley, lecturer in media and communications at City, University of London.
Graber acknowledges that this is a different path than they expected Bluesky to take when they first started looking at it in 2019 and 2020. But Graber and his colleagues won’t change that, and they think they can take advantage of it. “I think people are ready for change to some degree,” Graber says, “even if they don’t know exactly what change looks like.”
At least one more meaningful change is coming to Bluesky; smaller but still for the company. “We will be unveiling our new butterfly-shaped logo for the Bluesky app soon,” says Graber. “A butterfly flapping its wings is the chaos effect, and you can get a lot of changes that way.”