Bluesky surges as users seek social media alternatives to X

After X, formerly Twitter, saw a record estimated 281,600 accounts deactivated worldwide in just one day on November 6, according to internet traffic analyzer Similarweb, speculation has surged that the best days of Elon Musk's social media platform are behind it. 

Other microblogging sites, including Bluesky, have rocketed to the top of app download rankings and courted millions of new users in the week since Donald Trump won the US election.

Whether users are permanently leaving X or simply establishing new accounts elsewhere is unclear.

But major brands and individuals are citing Musk's substantial financial and rhetorical backing of Trump in the US election, as well as the polarizing nature of the X platform, as the reason for their departures.

Bluesky, originally a Twitter project that was spun off into its own company, has reported more than 1 million new users in the last week. It now has more than 15 million total users. 

While it's still a minnow in the social media field, the platform has shot to top spot in Apple's App Store rankings, just ahead of Instagram's own X competitor, Threads.

This isn't the first time X has seen a decline in active users. Downturns notably happened after Musk took ownership of Twitter in October 2022 and when Brazil temporarily banned the platform earlier this year.

But it looks as though Musk's support for Trump has proven the final straw for certain account holders.

"This is kind of a tipping moment to some extent," Bart Cammaerts, a communications and democracy researcher at London School of Economics, told DW.

Cammaerts pointed to the whittling down of moderation and the ramping up of Musk's own rhetoric around X's future direction as long-simmering developments that may have helped to push users away.

"The fact that we see now so many people making that move is a combination of approaches that have been ongoing for longer than [the election]."

Who's leaving X?

On Wednesday, The Guardian newspaper said it would no longer post on X, though would not delete its accounts.

It is not alone in departing or downsizing its X presence. American media companies NPR and PBS already stopped posting on the platform last year. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has also downsized its dozens of X offerings to just four: news, sport, Chinese language and "masterbrand" profiles.

More notable have been celebrity exits. US actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Bette Midler have both deleted their X accounts, while retaining presences elsewhere. They join previous X-iters like Elton John, Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg and Gigi Hadid who left or stopped posting after Musk's takeover in 2022.

Other public figures have voiced their intent to leave X but have yet to delete their profiles. They include prominent media and political names like former CNN news anchor turned YouTube streamer Don Lemon and Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

There's clearly a leftist lean to the most vocal personalities to depart the platform. But brands are leaving too — and from beyond the English-speaking world. The Berlin film festival and Bundesliga football team FC St. Pauli are German brands that have already announced their exit. And earlier this year, more than 50 other nonprofits announced their departure via the campaign website byebyeelon.de.

In 2023, major brands halted advertising on the platform citing a rise in hateful content, drawing a public rebuke from Musk.

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, however, is taking the exact opposite approach. The newly crowned Green Party candidate for the February election said he thought it was wrong to leave the platform to "loudmouths and populists.

Habeck withdrew from several social media platforms six years ago, but has now he has announced his return. 

Why are they leaving?

Among the reasons cited for departing the platform is the continued increase in negative content on the platform.

That includes the increase of toxic content, remarked by The Guardian in its published statement as "the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism."

But it might be difficult to pinpoint a single cause for the exit. The newspaper noted its decision had been a long time coming and that it resources could be "better used" elsewhere.

"News companies do not have unlimited resources, audiences do not have unlimited attention, so they might have to make a strategic decision if there is a platform that is associated to a high level of uncertainty when it comes to how the conversations will evolve in the short term," Silvia Majo-Vazquez, a political communication researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, told DW.

"They want to convert the audiences on social media platforms, [so] which audiences are you targeting right now on Twitter [X] with the drop of, also, [X] users? Other platforms are gaining traction, so probably they'll mobilize their resources to those platforms which provide new [groups] that are more difficult to reach — young audiences — and perhaps provide better environments."

For individuals, many are remarking the "feel" of other microblogging outlets is like a Twitter of old, with fewer bots and more one-to-one interactions.

"If those functionalities can be offered by alternatives and enough people make that switch, it could go quite quickly. We've seen that also in the past with other platforms like Myspace, for example," said Cammaerts.

Politics — and personalities — may keep migrating

As much as celebrities, politicians and brands may turn their gaze to new social pastures, upstart platforms are still vulnerable to the same negative interactions and toxic content prevalent on established social media.

"In a way people are going to the lesser of two evils because all these platforms have a business model that in essence is geared towards extraction, towards commodifying your sociality in ways contravening your privacy," said Cammaerts. "So, sure, X is the worst and is problematic for a number of political reasons, but it doesn't mean that these other platforms are necessarily 'the good'."

The future direction of public discourse online is difficult to predict, but Cammaerts believes it's a conversation that needs to start now. 

"What do we want our democratic media environment to be? How do we want it to look? And can we, through democratic means, regulate it in such a way that it reaches that [democratic] ideal more than it does today? That can also be a contentious debate."

It also assumes users will continue seeking "full view" public spaces to engage socially with each other. 

Majo-Vazquez predicted that the rise of closed groups on private messaging apps will continue to grow, pushing online interactions further away from the global public square Twitter originally aspired to.

"When it comes to social media platforms, the environment is getting more fragmented," she said.

"The attention that those major platforms were receiving … has been fragmented to many other places. Which winner will come out of this process, we don't know."

Edited by: Martin Kuebler

Update, November 16, 2024: This article has been updated with the news that German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck has returned to X.