Musk’s platform has lost 2.7 million active US users in two months, while its rival has gained 2.5 million
A mass departure from Elon Musk’s X has led to the site losing about 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in the US in two months, with its rival social media platform Bluesky gaining nearly 2.5 million over the same period.
The exodus has coincided with the departure of prominent figures such as the filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and Mike Flanagan, and the actors Quinta Brunson and Mark Hamill. Others, such as the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have maintained their X account but have begun posting more regularly on Bluesky.
According to the digital market intelligence company Similarweb, the number of daily active US users on X has dropped by 8.4% since early October, from 32.3 million to 29.6 million.
The number of Bluesky users has risen by 1,064%, from 254,500 to roughly 2.7 million since 6 October. The increase started slowly, but became more noticeable when Musk assumed control of the X handle @america to promote his Donald Trump-supporting Super Pac and began regularly posting in favour of the former and future president.
The flow increased further in the aftermath of Trump’s election win. Within a week of 5 November, Bluesky’s user total had doubled from 743,900 to 1.4 million. A week later it had doubled again to 2.8 million. In the 50 days after Musk’s formation of the Super Pac on the platform, X had gone from having nearly 127 times more active US users than Bluesky, to a little over 10 times as many.
Bruce Daisley, a former vice-president of the company in Europe, the Middle East and Africa when it was still known as Twitter, thinks the migration away from X is largely because the “digital town square” as Musk has called it has become a far less enjoyable place to be.
