Bluesky has “blown past” its user growth predictions to the point where it is scrambling to secure extra servers to keep the site working effectively, according to the social media platform’s COO.
Rose Wang told Business Insider that Bluesky’s recent surge in new users was “quite unexpected” and that the company’s 20-person staff has been in “firefighting mode.”
The social networking network now boasts 21 million users, up from 13 million in October, as X users leave in droves and flock to the site.
However, this level of growth has not been without its challenges. Bluesky experienced an outage earlier this month, which the firm attributed to an external internet provider.
To anticipate future development, it has increased server capacity at its data centers.
“We have grown by a million users every day for the last eight days, which has blown past our projections, and so we were going to get new servers next year, but we had to fast forward that,” Wang told me.
The US election appears to have prompted a shift of X users to Bluesky, which has been lauded for its resemblance to “old Twitter.” According to data from Similarweb, almost 280,000 users closed their X accounts on Election Day.
Gordon MacMillan, X’s former head of content strategy, recently told Business Insider that users are quitting the platform because its owner, Elon Musk, is using it as a political megaphone to endorse President-Elect Donald Trump. He also expressed concern over hate speech and misinformation around X.
Wang stated that Bluesky’s development has been driven by two factors: event-driven growth, where something happens on a different platform, such as X, and community-driven growth, where people join because they enjoy the platform’s interactions.
Bluesky was founded in 2019 as an internal project at X when it was still known as Twitter, with Jack Dorsey at the head. It debuted as a standalone entity in 2021, with Jay Graber as CEO.
It released a beta version of the software last year, and users could only enroll using an invite code until February. Dorsey left the board of directors in May as it transitioned to a corporate structure, telling Wired that it was “literally repeating all the mistakes” Twitter had made.
Bluesky’s ‘lightning in the bottle moment’
Wang stated that Bluesky gained traction among users when Musk purchased X for $44 billion in 2022.
“There was a moment in time when right after Elon purchased Twitter and before Threads launched, we had our lightning in the bottle moment where the whole world was paying attention to Bluesky, and we had invite codes,” she recalled.”
“We didn’t have invite codes to be a ‘hot’ exclusive club, but we had invite codes because we wanted to make sure our moderation was in place to bring on many millions of people,” Wang wrote.
Wang stated that it was a “hard decision” for the company to make because development is difficult to achieve, but “we chose to stick to our principles.”
According to Wang, the company has received several user requests for new functionality. Some of these are already available on X, such as the ability to favorite content and create lists of popular topics.
Wang says the company wants to create new goods, but with so many additional customers, its objectives have evolved dramatically. Instead of launching new features, Bluesky is focusing on key issues such as moderation and “firefighting.”
“We wish we had the resources to go and build those features,” she told me. “But instead, the team is focused on let’s make sure that one, the website stays online, and two, that moderation is intact so that we are responding to reports within 24 hours with global coverage, and three, that people are able to find each other and the end user is having a good experience.”
By the end of this year, the business intends to implement a premium subscription model that will include features such as configurable aesthetics, avatar frames, and more video uploads or high-resolution pictures.