- Bluesky has seen a million new users join since the US election
- Twitter (now known as X) is losing hundreds of thousands of users
- A Chrome extension lets you to find your friends from Twitter on Bluesky
Bluesky may become the micro-blogging social media app of choice for disillusioned Twitter users, if current trends continue.
Hundreds of thousands of people are seemingly fleeing X (formerly Twitter) in the wake of the US election, according to The Economic Times.
It’s possible X chairman Elon Musk’s subsequent appointment to a new position in Donald Trump’s incoming government has pushed some politically conscious users away from the site.
The Verge reports that Bluesky Social has attracted more than a million new users to its decentralized micro-blogging service since the presidential election took place on November 4, suggesting some level of migration between the two social media services is possible.
After all, Bluesky is a remarkably similar platform to X, having begun as an experimental spin-off of what was then Twitter in 2019 under the leadership of founder Jack Dorsey.
As TechCrunch reports, Dorsey no longer sits on the board at Bluesky, and the company is now an independent public benefit corporation with CEO Jay Graber at the helm.
The Bluesky user base now stands at more than 15 million total users – a fair few less than the 586 million monthly active users on X, but still impressive for a platform that is technically independent of major social media companies.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky offers a decentralized social media platform – that means the platform is not entirely controlled by one server or corporation.
When you log on to Bluesky, you also choose which instance you’re signing in to.
Like fellow Twitter-like platform Mastodon, Bluesky can exist in multiple instances – meaning a version of the site can be set up to cater to certain communities.
Otherwise, it’s essentially very similar to X, with short text-based posts, image and video sharing, liking and reposting, and individual profiles.
Its former relation to Twitter and ease of use have made Bluesky a prime candidate for those looking for X alternatives post-election.
How do I switch to Bluesky from Twitter?
You can join Bluesky by downloading the app from the App Store or Google Play Store, or heading to bsky.app, and setting up an account with an email address.
Migrating an X account to Bluesky is a larger task that takes a bit more work – and there are no official channels that enable this.
The Sky Follower Bridge extension for Chrome and Firefox enables users to find the users they previously followed and were followed by on X on Bluesky.
Adding the extension, and then running it while signed in to Bluesky and with Twitter open to either the Following, Followers, List or Blocked pages, returns a list of matched Bluesky accounts, produced by scraping information from the Twitter page.
As ZDNet reports, Twitter has taken action to block apps and processes from using screen scraping, so there’s no saying how long Sky Follower Bridge will actually work for.
There’s no simple way to import X posts (tweets) to Bluesky, but Wikihow details a rather complex method to import posts by using Python and Terminal on a Linux or Mac computer. There doesn’t seem to be a way to import posts to Bluesky on mobile yet.
Bluesky seems poised to become an important player in the social media space as users, and even news outlets, leave X. For the latest updates as we hear them, be sure to keep up with our social media coverage.
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jamie.richards@futurenet.com (Jamie Richards)
