Bluesky is a social media, microblogging platform like X (formerly Twitter) which has started to grow exponentially in recent weeks. If social media is part of your business’s marketing strategy – or was but you’ve grown frustrated with it – then there are several reasons why you might consider using Bluesky. This is particularly true if you’ve used X but you’re among those increasingly concerned about its potential to damage your brand.
In this guide we’ll explore some of those reasons, but first we’ll try to answer more fundamental questions about Bluesky you might have.
Perhaps the more appropriate question for many is ‘what is Bluesky?’
Bluesky started life in 2019 as a research project at Twitter (as it was then named). It was funded by its former CEO Jack Dorsey and led by star Twitter developer, Jay Graber. The idea behind Graber’s original research project was to see if Twitter could be decentralised. Bluesky is the ongoing proof-of-concept for that work.
Since then, it has spun away to become the main business exertion of Bluesky Social, an independent US public benefit corporation which formed in late 2021 with Graber at its helm as CEO.
Superficially, it’s near identical to X; users can post, re-post, like and comment on short textual utterances (up to 300 characters) along with other types of content (images, short videos) that appear in an endlessly updating vertical timeline. The feed can be sliced, diced and filtered to suit myriad audience needs.
X severed its ties with Bluesky after billionaire majority-owner of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, acquired Twitter in October 2022. Seeing the opportunity to take the network from the lab to reality, Graber accelerated development of the project and Dorsey joined Bluesky Social’s board.
Bluesky launched in beta, as in invite-only platform in February 2023. Shortly after, it received $US15 million in series A funding from a group of investors led by venture capital group, Blockchain Capital.
In February 2024, Bluesky ended its beta phase and hung out a shingle inviting anyone to use the platform.
Dorsey confirmed his exit from Bluesky’s board on X in May this year, leaving only a cryptic tweet for followers to decipher as to his reasons for the decision. Some interpreted the ambiguous tweet, in which he encouraged people to use their “freedom technology”, as an endorsement of X (even though the statement could just easily have been giving a nod to Bluesky).
Why am I seeing so much buzz about Bluesky now?
It’s a culmination of factors, but essentially its due to a sudden and spectacular increase in the number of users joining Bluesky each day.
At the time of writing, it was growing at the staggering rate of about six users per second or a half-a-million per day, down from peaks of up to a million and closing in a new all-time-high of 21 million users.
For perspective, that’s seven million new users since October 24 and more than half the total user base that Bluesky had accumulated during its previous 18 months of operation.
Clearly, the concept behind Bluesky isn’t new, but it’s expected to deliver some much-needed improvements that could spare it the fate of its ancestral cousin, X, which many believe has become a toxic, unusable mess.
Why is X losing its appeal?
Dissatisfaction among X’s user base has grown gradually since Musk acquired it for a reported $US44 billion in 2022. However, it appears to have shifted seismically since President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections.
Musk enthusiastically and publicly endorsed Trump’s candidacy, and he’s been appointed to an influential role in his administration. Many appear to be seeing that as confirmation that he’s allowed X to degenerate into cesspit of disinformation to further his personal and commercial aims, having shifted his sympathy toward US right wing political interests.
Musk era Twitter/X
Musk’s first controversial decision after taking the reins at Twitter was to deprive thousands of X accounts owned by celebrities, journalists and other public figures of their “verified” status; the so-called “blue ticks”. Some highly prominent celebrities were allowed to keep their verification ticks to preserve the overall credibility and value of the platform, However, it opened the possibility that the previously verified accounts would become vulnerable to impersonators and, more broadly, make it harder for users to distinguish eminent figures from the crowd.
At the time, Musk said that it was to flatten the playing field in the ‘digital town hall’ or ‘square’. However, he then promptly monetised the blue tick as a feature of paid X subscription accounts, now known as X Premium and X Premium+.
Continued slicing and dicing of the X paid subscription service into tiers made it easier for users to increase their clout the more they opened their wallets, but it was intensely irritating for everyone else. Musk gave paid blue tick account tweets greater priority for reach and visibility. The community of early X adopters were seeing the reward for their effort and loyalty to the platform sold, largely, to users they perceived to be cretins and lunatics.
Musk rebranded Twitter as X in July 2023, a move that many felt was ludicrously vainglorious and unnecessary.
The reversal of permanent bans on accounts belonging to neo-Nazis and other controversial figures in the hard right media deepened the resentment.
Musk’s personal tweets were also becoming increasingly controversial and unpredictable, casting further doubt on his competence to run the platform. During the 2020 COVID pandemic, the medical community expressed outraged when he asserted that children were “essentially immune” to the virus (more recently, he endorsed a tweet widely viewed as deeply antisemitic).
Weakened user protection
Musk’s next major operational decision for X was as incendiary as it was baffling.
Days before polls opened for the 2024 US election, X started weakening its feature allowing users to block each other. Users could continue using it stop others from interacting with them and their posts on the platform, but it would no longer stop them from seeing their tweets; if they wanted to do that, they’d have to make their entire accounts private (allowing them only to be seen by followers), crippling their reach.
Many X users likened it to allowing online predators to stalk their targets and it was enough to trigger a steady stream of exits from the platform.
After the US election, online activist group, Led By Donkeys, produced a short doco accusing Musk of using his wealth and his reach on X to run a disinformation campaign to boost Donald Trump’s election prospects. The group turned the doco into a spectacle by projecting it onto the side of Telsa’s headquarters and filming the event for later distribution across social media, including X.
The doco contained claims that Musk manipulated X’s algorithm to make himself the “pre-eminent presence on X” and then used his reach to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories about Trump’s political opponents.
From around mid-2024, some prominent anti-Trump X users started noting a mysterious fall in engagements with their accounts. After the US election, Australia’s Queensland University of Technology released the findings of research it conducted during the period which detected an algorithmic bias on X favouring pro-Republican accounts.
Advertiser uncertainty
Contradictory reports have emerged over current advertiser confidence in the platform. Some say advertisers are planning to reduce spending on it in 2025 due to concerns about brand safety, but others report that Trump’s victory will see advertisers return to the platform.
Last week, The Guardian threw in the towel, announcing that it would no longer tweet from its official accounts on X.
“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse,” it said in an article explaining its decision.
When changes to X’s terms of service came into effect allowing content generated on its platform to train AI, many saw it as a sign to leave. Discussion about moving away from the social media platform among its key characters took on a sombre tone and they seemed resolute about walking away from large followings built up over years.
High-profile accounts including Mark Hamill, journalist Don Lemon, Lizzo, Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, Ben Stiller and Jamie Lee Curtis found their way to the exit and over the road to Bluesky.
The trickle soon turned into a tsunami. Groaning under the weight of new sign-ups and scrambling to provision new servers, Bluesky’s operators contemplated returning to an invite-only mode, but then decided that riding the momentum was better.
How will Bluesky be different to X?
The key components of its user interface and features are very similar to X’s. However, it has a different atmosphere; its users are encourage a non-combative culture, keen to smother the one that that permeated X after Musk acquired it.
For now, there’s also no obnoxious advertising or shouty, aggressive blue ticks bullying their way up the algorithm. And, in the case of the latter, their efforts might by thwarted by the platform’s design principles, permanently. Once you start delving into the potential of its technical blueprints, you start to understand how it might achieve that.
Graber’s guiding vision for the network’s design was, as much as possible, to free it from the control of a single entity, minimise the need to regulate and prioritising trust and safety. Furthermore, its design future-proofs the platform against any future owner attempting to tampering with those principles.
Recently, Graber told CNN that Bluesky’s goal was to give its users access to all the code and the tools that they need to customise their experience on the platform. In essence, she said it would be a “more democratic form of social media to reflect a more democratic society”.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but you might say that Bluesky is to X what Linux is to proprietary software; one aims for a centralised control and development while the other prefers it be open and cooperative, “open source”.
It appears that this concept also extends to the essential task of content moderation on the platform. Bluesky says that some moderation tasks could be handled in a distributed way, but the exact mechanisms it’s proposing to achieve that are less clear.
Distributed moderation
Bluesky Social still moderates objectionable material and abusive conduct at a high level in the network, but it also proposes what it calls “composable moderation”. The idea is to lets users and third-party service providers join in the fun. This way, it argues, users will be able to deploy additional layers of moderation according to their needs.
“Automated filtering is a commoditized service by now, so we will be taking advantage of this to apply a first pass to remove illegal content and label objectionable material. Then we will apply server-level filters as admins of bsky.social, with a default setting and custom controls to let you hide, warn, or show content. On top of that, we will let users subscribe to additional sets of moderation labels that can filter out more content or accounts,” the company said in a blog, April 2023.
It’s not clear whether Bluesky will ever feasibly achieve that goal for the average user. However, it does, to a degree, give them more control of their experience out of the gate.
Custom feeds & identity verification
Bluesky has the equivalent of X’s algorithmically generated ‘For you’ timeline called ‘Explore’. But it also gives users the ability to create their own custom algorithmic timelines or “feeds”.
Bluesky Social says that, for now, creating custom algorithms will require some familiarity with software development. However, it’s possible to build a useful custom feed using third-party tools such as Skyfeed, a visual building interface that allows users to create feeds with little or no coding knowledge. Similar services are sure to follow if the platform maintains its current rate of growth.
Bluesky has also come up with an interesting technique to tackle the thorny problem of online impersonators and trademark violation for brands. It’s not difficult to invent a handle that sounds official; if enhanced with a bit of stolen branding, they can easily fool the untrained eye and were a problem in the early days of Twitter.
But Bluesky gives companies and, if they have them, individuals, a way to use their websites’ domain names as their alias, stopping impersonators in their tracks. Bluesky has a method of authenticating domain name ownership with domain registrars that ensures that only its valid owner can use it as a Bluesky account handle. For example, only the New York Times can use @nytimes.com and so on.
So, should I be turning to Bluesky?
If you’re currently using X for your social media strategy, then almost certainly, if only due to its rapid growth.
While there are no guarantees that it will match X’s reach imminently (and X’s mega accounts will be highly reluctant to abandon the platform altogether) dissatisfaction with Musk’s platform is testing new highs. If Bluesky only manages to achieve 20 per cent of X’s user base in the near term, it will have 70 million users (X currently has around 335 million active users).
Secondly, currently there is far less digital noise on Bluesky than there is on X, which means that users will have a far better chance of noticing your message. Furthermore, features like custom feeds could be an opportunity to build audiences walled from this incessant noise.
For example, a skincare company could invest a small amount into creating, branding and curating a custom feed that captures all the current discussion on the platform around that topic and offering it publicly. It could then raise awareness of its brand by injecting its own messaging into that feed.
Finally, the culture and conduct of users on Bluesky is, at least for now, far less abrasive than on X. It’s currently an oasis from the frenetic rage baiting that has made other social media platforms, such as TikTok and Facebook toxic, and its currently free of their spammy advertising practices.
LinkedIn?
We can anticipate some of you thinking ‘What about LinkedIn?’ Wouldn’t that provide the safest brand environment?’ Sure, LinkedIn is the gold standard when it comes to professional discourse, but it’s not a channel to reach customers in a meaningful way. However, it’s a means for companies and professional peers to try to stand out from one another rather than reach customers. (And frankly, some of the ways that they try to cut through have started to go beyond satire). Bluesky is an opportunity to show a more human side to your brand in a semi-conversational setting.
Of course, Bluesky won’t be suitable for all businesses. Some may still exclusively choose channels such like Instagram and TikTok for their social media channels, willing to overlook their shortcomings if their marketing approach lends itself heavily to aesthetic concerns, use of influencers or the need to reach a narrow demographic of consumers that are averse to other forms of social media.
The idea of yet another social media channel may sound exhausting, but check in with marketing teams to see what they think. Bluesky may not be a new idea, but it’s certainly a prime site to explore opportunities for first mover advantage.