Bluesky takes bite out of X, as global users flee social media giant: analyst

Fourteen years ago, Don Spicer opened a Twitter account. It was a useful tool in in his professional life.

“When I was with public safety, I would engage with citizens,” said Spicer, a retired police officer who worked in media relations.

Spicer also used Twitter to follow local news, but he eventually became less active on the social media platform, which was renamed X in 2023.

“Over the last year or so I guess, it was getting increasingly negative, and I like to surround myself with more positivity,” said Spicer, who last week left X and switched to Bluesky, a platform that is new to the social media world and is now exploding in global popularity. “I found much of the content I went to Twitter for is starting to show up there, and I’m seeing more local flavour, and it’s more respectful.”

Bluesky is billed as a platform where users can create custom content feeds, and control what they see while avoiding what they don’t want to see.

“We’re always focused a lot on trust and safety, making sure that users have an ability to have an experience that’s, you know, free from bots and harassment and spam,” said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.

Previous competitors have tried and failed to take a bite out of Twitter/X. Technology analyst Carmi Levy said it appears Bluesky has legitimate growth momentum in the U.S. and elsewhere, and could be a significant threat to X.

“We are seeing some reports of about 100,000 accounts closing per day on X and we are seeing numbers from Bluesky, that traffic is up 500 per cent and they have doubled their size in the past two months,” said Levy. “They’ve just hit 21 million followers.”

The trends Levy cited are worldwide. No data specific to Canada was available, so information available to analysts is focused on global activity.

According to Levy, the last two weeks have seen the largest exodus from X since Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2023.

Levy suggested Musk himself has also turned off some X users.

“Elon Musk essentially used X as a giant megaphone for his views and those who follow his views essentially amplified that as well,” said Levy.

It should be noted, as Bluesky grows, X remains a very popular social media giant, with more than 500 million active accounts. Bluesky’s audience remains relatively small in comparison, The Associated Press reported last week. 

Digital anthropologist Giles Crouch told CTV National News that X’s future will come down to one thing.

“Is it too big to fail? Absolutely not. The big judge of all this, as it is with any technology, is culture.”

Crouch said X will have to change some of its online negativity if it hopes to stop the recent exodus.

“Twitter or X can survive, but it may become shell of itself,” said Crouch, who added if that were to happen, it could lead to even more of an opportunity for Bluesky to continue to attract new members who are leaving X in large numbers.