Bluesky Gave Up on Competing with X

There was a moment about 18 months ago when the left was really excited about Bluesky. This CNBC article was published in November 2024:

Disgruntled X users are again flocking to Bluesky, a newer social media platform that grew out of the former Twitter before billionaire Elon Musk took it over in 2022. While it remains small compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk…

Bluesky said in mid-November that its total users surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the end of October, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and talk to others online. The post-election uptick in users isn’t the first time Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X.

Bluesky really did grow for a while and lots of people on the left started trying to move not just their own accounts but many of their followers over to the new platform. These days the site has 45 million registered users.

And yet, 18 months later it’s fair to say that Bluesky is nowhere near being a competitor to X. Exact numbers are hard to source but X currently has about 250 million daily users whereas Bluesky is hovering somewhere between 1.5 million daily users and fewer than half that.

I missed it at the time but last month Bluesky sort of admitted that parity with X was not in the cards. Instead they plan on being more like Reddit.

…two years since its launch, the site has around just 10% of X’s estimated global users. Bluesky’s Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told CNBC that the site saw its future not in rivalling X, but in taking inspiration from the online community forum Reddit.

“The world is changing rapidly, and we’re not trying to build what social used to be and get to parity,” Wang told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday…

“What we’ve learned through this process is that I think the public square is not the direction we want to go in. Essentially, I think it’s useful as a discovery mechanism, but we’re very inspired by companies like Reddit.” she said.

“A public square, where there’s only a stage, and there’s posters, like people on a stage and people who are watching, that is not social… we’re in the medieval stages of the online world.”

The explanation for Bluesky’s failure is pretty funny to me. It sounds like this: Yeah, we thought about being wildly successful and having hundreds of millions of users but that’s not for us. That’s the caveman internet. We’re into being a niche product…like Reddit.

I hate to break it to them but Reddit has hundreds of millions of users. I can’t stand that place but it clearly has lots of fans. Why would anyone want a site that’s like Reddit but a lot smaller? I don’t think that’s going to work as a business plan but let’s see if the number of daily users continues to shrink. My guess is it will.

Bluesky’s actual problem is the one that no one there wants to talk about. It is a political silo for left-wing extremists that has a reputation for death threats and cancel culture. In fact, the last time I noticed something happening on Bluesky was when Popehat was banned for suggesting it would be good if someone murdered Elon Musk.

NEWS: Popehat @Popehat, aka attorney Ken White, has been permanently banned from Bluesky, apparently for a post in which he suggested there was a moral upside to Elon Musk’s death.

The Bluesky body politic, meanwhile, is losing its mind over this. Popehat is one of their heroes. pic.twitter.com/iKcUXrGe15

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) June 24, 2026

He was invited back of course but apparently chose not to return. In the process of writing this post I came across this:

bluesky is so cool pic.twitter.com/NUxMlQYUls

— jon repetti (@pourfairelevide) July 16, 2026

That’s Bluesky in a nutshell and it’s not a winning formula. No one wants to be lectured by leftist loons, not even other leftist loons. It gets tiresome fast which is why Bluesky has 45 million registered users but only a handful of them actually use the site.

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