BlueSky Hits #1 In The App Store, Is It Worth Switching From Twitter?

BlueSky

Every time Elon Musk has done something people hate with Twitter (now X), other recently sprung-up rival sites like BlueSky and Threads surge in downloads. Then, people usually just trickle back or don’t really leave until the cycle starts again. Things may be different this time, however.

Now, in the wake of Trump’s election and Elon’s literal appointment to a role in his administration, Twitter has seen a huge exodus of users and BlueSky has seen a record surge of over a million new sign-ups, in addition to users who had previously made accounts coming back. As a result, BlueSky is currently the #1 app in Apple’s App Store, with the other main Twitter rival, Threads, at #2.

Is it time for you to switch from Twitter to BlueSky? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for, and I can mainly only speak for my own experience.

Engagement: One of my chief concerns is trying to rebuild an audience on BlueSky when it took me almost 15 years to rack up 180,000 followers on Twitter. But now with just 11,000 on BlueSky, I am getting almost equivalent engagement on the platform, if not more, at times. Part of this is users who are genuinely enjoying BlueSky and sticking around, part of this is that at this point, enormous chunks of a large follower based like mine on Twitter is bots or defunct accounts. There is also no algorithm suppressing you for whatever you might be posting (links to outside sites, for one). So this has become less of a concern to me than before.

Actual, Logical Features: While Twitter has taken almost all the safeguards off its platforms like a melting down nuclear plant, BlueSky has a robust set of safety and content moderation tools, including a block functionality that still actually works, and ways to highly customize your feed so you’re not being fed a bunch of stuff you hate.

The bluesky social network has soared to one of the top positions in social network downloads in app ... [+] stores in the past week since the US election. The company reported a recent gain of 700,000 new users joining the social media platform, an alternative to X (formerly known as Twitter). (Photo by Ian LANGSDON / AFP) (Photo by IAN LANGSDON/AFP via Getty Images)

More People Are There Now: This is a pretty simple one, but more and more people are moving over to BlueSky so it feels less like a ghost town than when it first launched. This includes say, longtime mutuals, but also the sorts of public figures you’d want to follow over there. It’s not everyone, but with these recent surges, more and more people are going over, and posting more and more often as a result.

An “Echo Chamber”?: One of the biggest complaints about BlueSky is that it feels too much like a mostly liberal echo chamber. Yes, in some ways that’s true, and yet as someone who has become truly exhausted with the discourse on Twitter, it’s nice to post things, even unpopular opinions, without getting yelled at by dozens of people you don’t even know. I did a test post about how I liked The Acolyte, a controversial Star Wars show, and my mentions were full of people who either liked it too, or didn’t, but essentially said “you do you.” On Twitter, I would have thirty people calling me a joke and lamenting the state of woke entertainment journalism. A right-winger poster would quote tweet me and five rage-farming YouTubers would make videos about me (“Forbes Journalist Shills for Disney Star Wars!). In short, I view BlueSky as less of an echo chamber and more of a “people are no longer screaming at me all the time” chamber, which is nice.

BlueSky may indeed still only have a fraction of Twitter’s userbase, but we do now have to start taking into account the sheer amount of bots and abandoned accounts over there, so the gap may be closer than we think. Is it time to switch? For me, I still have to straddle both for my job, but I think it’s time for many people to seriously think about doing so, considering the state of things over there.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.