Bluesky said Thursday evening that over 1 million people signed up for the platform in the last 24 hours, making it one of the busiest days for the company. This also meant the social network crossed the mark of 16 million users overall.
The platform’s announcement comes hours after Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Threads had seen more than 15 million sign-ups in November. He added that the Meta-owned platform has had 1 million sign-ups a day for the last three months.
Bluesky also faced some teething issues Thursday as service went down for some users, because one of the company’s ISPs had a cable issue that got clubbed with other networking snafus, according to a Bluesky developer.
The decentralized social network has seen a steady inflow of users in the last few months with different events like X’s ban in Brazil, moderation issues on Threads, and the recent election results in the U.S. X owner Elon Musk was a prominent supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, and the social networking service (formerly known as Twitter) often promoted pro-Trump viewpoints in users’ algorithmic feeds. After the results of the U.S. presidential election, more than a million new people signed up on the platform in a week, Bluesky said Tuesday.
At the time of writing, the sign-up surge on Bluesky in the last 24 hours also placed the app at the top of the free apps chart on the App Store in the U.S., followed by ChatGPT and Threads.
Bluesky is still much smaller overall than Threads, which has over 275 million active users, and X. However, the platform’s CEO Jay Graber posted earlier this week that Bluesky has a higher engagement than X.
“We also have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven’t dipped below ~30% posters,” she said in a separate post.
Last month, Bluesky said it raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, DarkMode’s Amir Shevat, and Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda. On the product front, the company said it planned to launch subscriptions.
