Bluesky barrels toward 1 million new sign-ups in a day

Social media app Bluesky has picked nearly a million new users just a day after exiting its invitation-only beta and opening to everyone.

In a post on its main rival — X (formerly Twitter) — Bluesky shared a chart showing a sudden boost in usage on the app, which can now be downloaded for free for the iPhone and also Android devices.

Bluesky added that since broadening the availability of the service yesterday by coming out of beta, the app has seen more than 850,000 new signups, expanding its community to more than 4 million accounts.

After opening access yesterday, Bluesky has crossed 4M users! 🎉

• 850k+ new users have signed up
• Averaged 8.5 new accounts/second
• 2M posts were created in the last 24 hours

Sign up for Bluesky here, no invite code required: https://t.co/xjTBYE9oOJ pic.twitter.com/vDB4pdnERy

— bluesky (@bluesky) February 7, 2024

Bluesky launched its iPhone app in February 2023 before releasing an Android version two months later.

But the team behind it decided to take things steady, keen to grow the service slowly and in a controlled manner by bringing in new users via invitation codes from existing members, or by sending codes to those who had signed up to a wait list.

Last December, Bluesky took a significant step by making posts on the platform viewable to anyone via the web, regardless of whether they had an account.

And this week the team has gone all the way, finally making the app available to all.

Now all eyes are on whether it can continue to rapidly build its base by drawing in users from X, particularly those unhappy with Elon Musk’s stewardship of the platform since he acquired the company in 2022 for $44 billion.

Bluesky could also pull in some users from Threads, the X-like social media app launched by Meta to great fanfare in July last year. Threads saw 5 million signups in just the first four hours, and has since grown to around 130 million monthly active users. That may be a lot, but the figure is still well short of X’s estimated 368 million monthly users.

A number of people also headed to Mastodon, another X-like service, though some have found it difficult to set up and navigate compared to X’s relatively straightforward system.

Bluesky now finds itself in a critical phase as it waits to see just how much demand there is for another microblogging app in a space that sees one app continuing to dominate.