The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has caused X users to switch to other social media services.
16:15•Updated 16:20
Social media platform Bluesky has seen its user base explode as people flee the multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s own X message service.
Several public figures have said they are withdrawing from X after Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States. The British newspaper The Guardian and the Swedish Dagens Nyheter have also reported on his departure.
Several advertisers, such as the World Bank, have also left X before.
The parties that withdrew have justified their decision by the rampant presence of disturbing content, such as racism and conspiracy theories, and by the tainted atmosphere of the platform.
On Election Day alone, more than 115,000 US users deleted their accounts from X, says Reuters. This is the biggest user loss since Musk bought the platform from Twitter in 2022.
Mass protests or at least significant discussions about the future of the service have occurred in waves in the past during X’s history, for example regarding changes in moderation and paid features.
Such is X’s competitor Bluesky
The messaging service Bluesky has reported that it has gained approximately 2.5 million new users during the current week alone. Its total number of users has increased to more than 16 million.
Bluesky was opened to the public in February this year and is behind the former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey. He has since distanced himself from the company and confirmed in May that he had left the company’s board.
The basic functionality of the service is very similar to Elon Musk’s X and Twitter before it. Users can publish short text, image and video updates, send private messages, follow other users and react to others’ updates.
Users can also block other users, which may attract those who have criticized Musk changes made to X’s blocking function. Platform rules also prohibit the promotion of hatred and extremism, for which X has been criticized.
Perhaps the biggest difference, however, is that Bluesky works as a decentralized platform. It simply means that users can store their data on servers other than those owned by the company.
In addition, Bluesky is based on open source code, which means that outsiders have the opportunity to see how the platform is built.
Despite its strong growth, Bluesky’s number of users is significantly lower than its competitors.
X’s data has not been disclosed to the public, but according to Reuters there would be around 317 million users. Threads, a member of the meta, has approximately 275 million monthly active users.
Threads is also doing well
Another key competitor of X is the social service Threads. It is a service launched last year by the Meta company known for its Facebook.
The service gathered more than 100 million users in a few days and was the fastest growing application in the history of the moment. It is primarily a text service, where the length of texts is limited to 500 characters.
Threads has also been increasing its user numbers recently. Director of Meta’s Instagram Adam Mosser tellsthat Threads has gained more than 15 million new users in November alone.
Sources: Reuters, AP, Forbes, TechCrunch
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