Although Bluesky crossed one million downloads a few months ago, not all users who downloaded the app had accounts as access is restricted.
Social networking service Bluesky has now hit a million users. The app, which originally spun out of Twitter (now known as X), officially hit this milestone, according to a recent post.
A strategy and operations personnel at Bluesky, Rose Wang made a post on X announcing the news. According to an image posted by Wang, Bluesky has 1,000,055 users. Bluesky has deliberately restricted the number of users the platform accepts by using a waitlist or an invitation from existing users.
Back in July, BlueSky hit a million downloads shortly after Meta launched Threads. However, the app did not hit the same number of active users because many people downloaded it off their app stores without acceptance via the waitlist or an invitation.
Bluesky Hit a Million Downloads after Rate Limits on Twitter
In July, Bluesky saw record traffic in reaction to Elon Musk announcing view limits on Twitter. Musk had announced that verified accounts will only see 6,000 posts each day, while unverified and new unverified accounts will see a limit of 600 and 300 posts, respectively. At the time, other Twitter rivals, including Mastodon, saw increases in traffic. On July 2, Mastodon CEO and creator Eugen Rochko said the social network’s user base climbed by at least 110,000.
X is still the most popular microblogging social media platform, even in the face of rivals like Bluesky and Meta’s Threads. Meta launched its Threads app on the Apple App and Google Play stores in July and eventually surpassed 100 million users in less than a week. Before Threads, ChatGPT was the fastest-growing app. The OpenAI generative artificial intelligence chatbot hit 10 million daily users in 40 days and 100 million monthly users in under two months.
Following the Threads launch, Meta introduced a few features, including a new “Following” tab previously absent on the app. Unfortunately, Threads is now struggling with user retention. However, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a July company town hall meeting, retention was still better than expected. Nonetheless, he noted that it would be “awesome” if even half of all the 100 million sign-ups at the time remained active on Threads. Zuckerberg also added that it is “normal” for some users to leave the app.
Twitter and Meta Rivalry
Shortly after Threads launched, Twitter issued a letter to Meta, calling it a “copycat” app. The letter written by Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro, accused Meta of intentionally employing former Twitter employees and deliberately assigning them to develop Threads “with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets”. Spiro states that Meta asked these employees to also use Twitter’s intellectual property to quicken the development of Threads “in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter”.
Meanwhile, X is expanding its services and has secured a crypto trading and payment license in Rhode Island. The Rhode Island Currency Transmitter license allows X to hold virtual currency on an entity’s behalf. This plays into Musk’s intention to make X an “everything app”.
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