In February 2023, a half-dozen techies introduced a social network prototype in an invitation-only launch. They deliberately debuted their creation, Bluesky, with little fanfare so that they could closely manage its growth.
But lately, it has been anything but slow and steady.
Over the past week, Bluesky’s growth has exploded, more than doubling to 15 million-plus users as people seek alternatives to X, Facebook and Threads. It has rocketed to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores as the most downloaded free app. Its ascent has been so rapid that the company has been forced to grow up practically overnight.
Bluesky’s 20 full-time employees have been working around the clock to deal with the issues that come with hyper-growth: site outages, glitches in the code and content moderation issues. Most importantly, they have been trying to keep early users happy as new members have flooded in.
“We as a team take pride in our ability to scale quickly,” Jay Graber, 33, the chief executive of Bluesky, said in an interview. “But there’s always some growing pains.” She added that the app — which is still dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram and X — was adding more than one million new users a day.
Bluesky is surging amid upheaval in the social media world. After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he morphed it into X, changing many of its functions and alienating some of its most loyal users. Threads, an app similar to X that Meta introduced last year, relies mostly on an opaque algorithmic curation that excises politics from people’s feeds. That has caused some people to head to other networks, including Bluesky, to discuss hot-button social issues.