The BlueSky logo will appear on your phone’s screen and its icon will appear behind it.
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Bluesky, a social media platform born within Twitter, rose to prominence as a rival to the network after Elon Musk acquired the company and rebranded it to X.
But now, two years after its launch, the site only has about 10% of X’s estimated global users. Rose Wang, Bluesky’s chief operating officer, told CNBC that the site’s future lies not in competing with X, but in drawing inspiration from online community forums. reddit.
“The world is changing rapidly, and we’re not trying to build on the social equivalent of what it used to be,” Wang told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday.
Wang said Bluesky will move away from the “public square” style of X and Threads feeds and instead “serve” as a discovery mechanism.
“What we’ve learned through this process is that we don’t think the public square is the direction we want to go. Essentially, we think it’s useful as a discovery mechanism, but we’re very inspired by companies like Reddit,” she said.
“A public square that just has a stage and posters like people on the stage and people watching is not social… We’re in the medieval stage of the online world.”
Reddit launched in 2011, billing itself as the “front page of the Internet” and offering “sub-Reddits” on a vast range of topics. The company will go public in 2024, trading at around $170 per share.
Bluesky is built on the open source AT protocol, giving developers more control over their content to build apps, services, and communities. Bluesky was originally founded within Twitter in 2019 and was backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, but became independent in 2021. After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, the two companies ended their service agreement.
The company raised $100 million in Series B funding in April 2025, but as of the end of October last year, it reportedly saw a 40% drop in daily mobile active users over the previous 12 months.
Bluesky’s daily active poster count has fallen from a peak of 1.4 million at the end of 2024 to around 600,000 today, according to a former head of engineering at Bluesky who posts user statistics on the platform.
There are an estimated 450 million X users worldwide, compared to 43 million users worldwide as of March. Threads, a platform linked to Instagram meta According to company executives, the service will launch in 2023 and had more than 400 million monthly active users last year.
Wang said the decline “generally follows the establishment curve of many social companies, where there are big external events and so on, and then they plateau, but that plateau is much higher than the previous bump, so it’s not all downhill.”
She told CNBC that Bluesky needs to “modernize and bring its video capabilities up to par,” specifically improving its upload speeds and the length of videos it can publish.
“This is one area where we haven’t done well, but I think this is an opportunity. Our biggest challenge is our biggest opportunity,” Wang said.
He added that Bluesky had not explicitly ruled out advertising, but said other companies had treated advertising business models “as if they had discovered oil.”
