Getting started on Bluesky

Observations of a new-old school social network

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I’m old enough to witness the rise and fall of many social networks hyped as the next big thing. Digg. Foursquare. Google Buzz. Vine. Hive. Meerkat. Google+. Peach.

Just kidding. No one remembers Peach.

And now, Bluesky is having a moment. The proto-Twitter clone absorbed 1.25 million users in 48 hours following the election, and continues to gain traction with upwards of a million new users a day (as does Threads, but not as dramatically as the left-for-DOA Bluesky).

To be clear, even with its rapid growth, Bluesky is still not even close to the scale of existing mainstream social networks, including Twitter/X.

• Bluesky: 15.2 million monthly active users.
• Facebook: 3.07 billion monthly active users.
• Instagram: 2 billion monthly active users.
• TikTok: 1 billion monthly active users.
• X: 386 million monthly active users
• Threads: 275 million monthly active users

For me, that’s the attraction. And evidently, for millions of other new users.

At this point in its history, Bluesky has both scale and niche appeal. There’s a critical mass but the stakes…