Bluesky Gains Momentum in the Wake of X’s Blocking Changes

While Meta’s Threads has long seemed like the most logical successor to Twitter (now X), it could be a project that stemmed from within Twitter itself that ends up being the major winner of the latest exodus from the former bird app.

According to Bluesky, the decentralized social media project originally championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the platform gained half a million new users in just one day last week.

The Twitter-like app moved into the top five most downloaded apps on the U.S. App Store, while it also saw big gains in Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan as well, along with various other regions.

Bluesky further reported that it gained more than 1.2 million users in just two days. 

The surge in interest followed the latest update on X’s changes to blocking, which will soon enable people who you’ve blocked in the app to still see your posts, though they won’t be able to interact with them. X’s justification here is that blocked users can still see your posts anyway if they log into another account, so there’s no reason to maintain this functionality within its block option.

Evidently, many users disagree, with Meta’s Threads also seeing a surge in interest as a result of X’s blocking changes.

From a UI perspective, Bluesky is the most similar to what Twitter was before the Musk takeover, using essentially the same source code, though built on a wholly different connective architecture, allowing for a more customized, personalized experience.

Bluesky currently has around 12 million total users, but has seen a couple of big spikes in interest of late, first fueled by X’s ban in Brazil, and now in the wake of its blocking changes.

Most interestingly, and maybe of most concern for X, is that Bluesky is also gaining momentum in Japan, which is X’s second-biggest user market.

If Bluesky does draw an audience in both Brazil and Japan, that could eat into X’s user numbers, which are already in decline in some regions.

Of course, at 12 million users, Bluesky is still a long way off of Threads (currently on 200 million monthly actives) and X itself (500 million MAU). But even so, it is gaining ground. And with Threads still hesitant to lean into real time news discussion, particularly political content, maybe the door is open for Bluesky to make a bigger push.

And maybe that’s the surge that decentralized social media needs to become a real consideration in the space.

The challenge for decentralized social apps is that regular users simply don’t care about the extra control and customization afforded via these options, as most just want to log on and start reading. The added steps of choosing a server or algorithm, which are central to this push, serve more as an annoyance to non-tech users, and that’s been an impediment to mainstream adoption.

But if more conversations start moving there, maybe that will deliver the momentum required to spark more interest.

People don’t like extra steps, but they do want to be a part of trending discussions, and maybe this push will see Bluesky gain a real, significant audience, which will then draw a bigger crowd.

It’s got some way to go, but it’s another interesting wrinkle in the broader real-time social app push.