They are called “X-pats”, for “expatriates”. In recent weeks, many Internet users have left X, the social network formerly called Twitter, for other microblogging sites like Bluesky. The “blue sky”, in French version, has just exceeded the mark of 25 million registered in the world. There were only 9 million of them at the beginning of September. Bluesky seems to be the big winner of this digital exodus closely linked to American news and more particularly to the activity of a character: Elon Musk.
The boss of Tesla and SpaceX acquired Twitter in October 2022, before renaming it X a few months later. Its anti-moderation policy, its recommendation algorithm which values clash…and its own “tweets” quickly led to the first withdrawals, particularly from advertising. But the final blow, for his detractors, was his publicly expressed wish, since this summer, to have the Republican Donald Trump elected to the White House. His success in this mission and his new role within the administration only accentuated the migration of a wider fauna made up of political, media and cinema personalities. In particular towards Bluesky, founded in 2019 but opened to the general public in February 2024. The British newspaper The Guardianhimself “X-pat”, estimates that the social network has gained more than 2.5 million users in the last two months, in the United States alone. A quantity almost equivalent to the departures of X, still across the Atlantic, during the same period.
Will this momentum last? The soufflé, in truth, has subsided somewhat. Currently, one person registers every second (or half-second) on Bluesky – compared to peaks of 10 or even 12 registrations over this same period of time the week of the Republican’s victory. The network is, moreover, not the only one to welcome “X-Pats”, since Threads (Meta) and Mastodon are recovering their share of disappointments. Finally, some wonder: is it worth Really the shot? Thursday December 19, a French initiative called “Hello leaves X” has been launched. It provides Internet users wishing to leave one of the leaders of the project, the mathematician David Chavalarias at L’Express, X still weighs infinitely more, with 250 million daily active users, and retains a notable influence in the public debate. Chavalarias is to make January 20, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a crucial moment in this shift therefore, towards Bluesky, or else Mastodon.
Gradual decentralization
The latter is, for the moment, favored by informed observers of social networks. Because Mastodon is completely decentralized. A technical design that prevents a manager from controlling the operation of the network. Certainly, Bluesky’s promise is more or less similar, with its protocol called AT, also open (open source). Which explains why many “X-pats” consider it a place of trust. But this decentralization is not yet completely effective. Private messages, in particular, remain centralized. And if Bluesky allows in theory to freely build related applications – for example a video service, moderation or identity verification – on its decentralized system, they are, for the moment, still little developed in practice.
Like X, Bluesky is also not impervious to censorship. “He [a] enough for the government of Pakistan to block a single domain name to cut off access to Bluesky throughout the country”, warned at the end of November on the Mediapart blogthe online newspaper’s social media manager.
If it moves down this path, Bluesky may never be as decentralized as a Mastodon. This is the observation of Christine Lemmer-Webber, the developer behind the ActivityPub protocol. “There will always have to be a big company at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that company to do the work of mitigating abuse, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam […] It will be a centralized system which is based on the trust of centralized authorities,” she emphasizes. on its website.
Rejected by its founder
There are reasons for this. Bluesky openly focuses on ease of use. The objective is clear: to offer a user experience close to that of X, in order to attract those disappointed. Bluesky was born in 2019 under the leadership of former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The interface is similar in every way, as are the primary functionalities: write short messages, reshare them, like them, send private messages, build lists… Only the text limit has been slightly increased , 300 characters compared to 280 for X, and 140 at the beginning of the blue bird network.
Bluesky probably wants to distance itself from Mastodon. Jean Cattan, secretary general of the National Digital Council (CNNum), recognizes that the latter’s protocol is more “rough”, less easy to handle. Which surely explains why Mastodon, despite its good image, only has 15 million users, ten fewer than Bluesky, which quickly overtook it. “I’m not sure any of this matters much to the average user. Most people don’t want to create their own algorithm – they just want an app that works, where a bunch of people they like post interesting things at a regular pace”, summarizes tech journalist Kevin Roose, in the columns of New York Times.
What role does Jack Dorsey now play in Bluesky? The adventure ended badly. According to TechCrunchthe entrepreneur only had a minority role in the development of Bluesky. And this entity became independent in 2022, with engineer Jay Graber at its head, still in office. In early 2024, three years after his departure from Twitter, Jack Dorsey finally cut all ties with Bluesky by leaving its board of directors and closing his account, writing cryptically, on grant rights”. It now actively participates in another decentralized social network protocol competing with that of Bluesky, called Nostr, more focused on the use of cryptocurrencies.
The annoyance of the EU
The paternity remains no less obvious. In its qualities and its faults. Jean Cattan, from CNNum, regrets this desire to “copy the conversational space in Twitter fashion”. It would be interesting, according to him, to take advantage of the exodus of because they appear on our news feed, but because we were invited to join them.” The risk, on Bluesky, is also to see the same people emerge, the same atmosphere taking hold. The most followed account on Bluesky is that of elected Democrat and progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first to have exceeded one million subscribers. She is followed by the actors George Takei (Star Trek) and the leftmost of the “Jedi”, the hero of Star WarsMark Hamill. Already all very popular on Twitter, then X.
The fear is to reproduce the biases that have led to social networks, and more particularly X, becoming stifling. The topic of moderation and identity verification is already a headache for Bluesky. Among the 100 most followed individuals on the platform, 44% have at least one imitator who is not always well-intentioned, discovered the author of the “Faked Up” newsletter. A recent investigation by World also reveals the presence of illegal, child pornography content. As well as the registration of well-known misinformants, particularly in the French “complosphere”, raising fears of a resurgence of problematic publications.
The network has promised to recruit more moderators, increasing the total from 25 to 100. For 25 million users, that’s still a low ratio – one to 250,000. It doesn’t do much better than worst performers in this area, with one moderator for around 300,000 users worldwide.
In the European Union, however, X drops to one moderator for just over 60,000 users. A ratio impossible to calculate for Bluesky, which remains unclear on its number of registered members in Europe, for which it is criticized. “All EU platforms, even small ones like Bluesky, must have a dedicated page on their website where it shows how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established. This is not the case for Bluesky to date,” a European Commission spokesperson said at the end of November.
Pro-Trump funding?
“It is true that Bluesky has not delivered all of its promises in terms of governance,” says David Chavalarias. “But the spirit behind it is much healthier.” To its credit, the choice for users of their own recommendation algorithm – the way in which posts on the news feed are prioritized. On the moderation side, effective tools are available to registrants, such as lists of accounts to be blocked, and Bluesky intends to create a system of “community notes” in order to alert or correct misleading publications. And unlike X with “Grok”, Bluesky does not provide Internet users with an artificial image generator free of charge. One less thorn in your side. Bluesky is finally a public benefit company (benefit corporationin VO), which means that profit is, a priori, not its reason for being.
The fact remains that Bluesky is financed through venture capital, like Twitter in its early days. Blockchain Capital, the main partner of its latest fundraising – $15 million, in October – has an astonishing profile for a network presenting itself as the alternative to the Musk-Trump duo. One of its founders, ex-actor Brock Pierce, is a crypto tycoon, close to Steve Bannon, himself a former influential adviser to Donald Trump. According to the site OpenSecretswhich lists all political donations made during the campaign, Blockchain Capital employees mainly gave to Republican candidates during the recent election. With $100,000, in total, going to the Fairshake PAC, a powerful crypto lobby. And some 3000 dollars to Donald Trump. Nothing compares of course with the 130 million dollars personally invested by Elon Musk.
Bluesky also remains unclear on how it intends to satisfy its investors. Paid subscriptions are being considered, according to a draft posted on GitHub. On the menu, the possibility of loading higher quality, larger videos, profile customizations, a paid badge… Similarities with the controversial X subscription, but without algorithmic favoritism. The red line set by Graber and his teams. A use of advertising is not ruled out, indicated the CEO during an event organized by the media TechCrunch in San Francisco. But again, the approach would be decidedly different. “We want to keep our incentives aligned with users and make sure we don’t turn into a model where the user’s focus is the product.” The “nice” X has not yet shown his full game.
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