Anti-Musk: The social media site picking up a lot of X refugees in Australia

Social media platform Bluesky has racked up more than 2 million new users since the US election, surging in popularity and posting its highest-traffic day to date as a growing number of users migrate across from Elon Musk’s X.

Bluesky closed out last week as Australia’s top-ranked social media app in both Apple and Google’s app stores, firming as the social media website of choice for local X refugees.

Bluesky has added millions of users since the US election on November 5.Credit:

The platform was conceived as a decentralised Twitter clone by Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019, and launched to the public last year, promising almost identical functionality to Twitter but without the baggage and drama surrounding current X owner Elon Musk.

After a somewhat slow start, the platform is now catching on with users. It added 1 million users on Friday alone, climbing past 16 million in total, but faced temporary outages due to what the company blamed on a faulty fibre cable.

Bluesky offers a similar experience to X – users create profiles and can post short messages with text and images – and its user interface looks remarkably similar. A key difference is that it relies on decentralised infrastructure, such as cryptocurrencies, meaning no single individual or organisation owns or regulates it.

“Unlike other closed platforms, Bluesky is an open social network that gives users choice, developers the freedom to build, and creators independence from platforms,” a Bluesky spokeswoman said.

Elon Musk has dismissed The Guardian’s departure from X.Credit: Bloomberg

The spokeswoman said 2.5 million users had joined its platform in the past week and Bluesky is “prepared to meet this demand”.

Bluesky remains a relative minnow compared with X, formerly Twitter, which claims 250 million daily users. Despite an estimated 115,000 account deactivations globally, including a number of high-profile users such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephen King and The Guardian, X has also been growing its user base since the US election, its statistics show.

The X platform saw a record-breaking 942 million posts worldwide and a 15.5 per cent increase in new user sign-ups on US election day and the day after, a post by official account XData revealed.

Meanwhile, Threads (owned by Instagram’s parent company, Meta) is also on the rise. It’s been adding more than a million users a day this month.

It all amounts to a hotly contested social media landscape fuelled further by this month’s US poll.

There are questions now about whether X will merge with Truth Social, Donald Trump’s own social media network that has about 2 million users. Elon Musk bought Twitter for $US44 billion in 2022, and Truth Social’s current valuation sits at about $US10 billion, which would be easily affordable for the world’s richest man, Musk. There are also questions about whether Bluesky can maintain its current growth and momentum, including in Australia.

Kayla Medica, a start-up industry veteran and author of marketing book The Mehdeeka Method, said Twitter had long closed its Australian office, signifying a lack of interest in the local market.

Kayla Medica is a start-up industry veteran and author of marketing book The Mehdeeka Method.Credit:

“From a local investment in staff, offices and engaging with Australian prominent figures such as journalists and politicians, to a complete withdrawal from the market, X has not viewed Australia as more than a footnote in a closed chapter.”

Medica says while Bluesky is pitching itself as an X replacement, to date it has shown no indication it will diverge from X’s views of the Australian market.

“The next big thing in social media is hard to predict ... New platforms have a more saturated market, users who already have enough accounts, and without either a clear differentiation like TikTok’s ‘For You’ page focus or an overwhelming level of grassroots engagement, new platforms like Bluesky are facing a Sisyphean task,” she said.

“As for whether or not Musk’s investment in X was worthwhile, the success cannot be measured in a vacuum that only looks at classic tech metrics like active users or revenue from advertising.

“As his personal history shows, his fans are willing to follow him from platform to platform and won’t stay isolated to X even if it eventually shuts, just like the Sydney office.”

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