KUALA LUMPUR – Could X lose its crown as one of the most globally used social media platforms to Bluesky, a competitor with stark similarities quickly gaining traction among netizens?
X users are understood to have previously left the Elon Musk-owned platform following Republican candidate Donald Trump’s landslide win against his main rival Kamala Harris at the United States election earlier this month.
The abandonment of the platform, previously known as Twitter, has been linked to Musk’s vocal support of Trump, who has since appointed the entrepreneur alongside former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as leaders of the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency.
Internet traffic analyser Similarweb’s data state that 115,000 US-based web visitors deactivated their X accounts after voting day on November 5, marking the biggest drop the platform has seen since Musk formally took over in October 2022.
Musk had also revealed several updates to X which caused concern among users. In particular, changing X’s block feature to provide blocked users with the ability to view your posts and profile, but not interact with them, drew significant backlash.
While Musk had apparently tilted the platform’s algorithm in favour of inflammatory posts, he has also repeatedly joined the fray himself by spreading political and racial conspiracy theories to his over 200 million followers.
Some celebrities who opted to leave X behind for the sake of “self-preservation” also cited the “nasty and toxic” state of the platform, which had reportedly been losing an average of 14% of its users monthly under Musk’s ownership.
Amid the outflux, several social media networks have pitched themselves as alternatives to X, with Bluesky appearing to have caught the interest of many netizens, recently recording an additional 15 million users – a stark increase from its nine million users in September.
Bluesky, which used to be accessible via invitation only before opening its doors to everyone earlier this year, was created by Twitter’s then-chief executive officer Jack Dorsey in 2019 as a project which would create a decentralised standard for social media.
While Dorsey left Bluesky’s board in May this year, paving the way for the platform to be predominantly owned by Jay Graber as a US public benefit corporation, the site still carries a layout and colour scheme reminiscent of Twitter in its heyday.
The main difference between the two platforms, however, is focused on Bluesky’s decentralised nature, which allows users to host their data on servers other than those owned by the company.
While it also offers users the chance to more heavily moderate their own experience by selecting the algorithm for their feed and creating custom feeds based on special interests, its “anti-toxicity” features are also a key selling point.
The feature includes giving users an option to detach an original post of theirs from someone else’s quote post, thus preventing unwanted interactions.
A host of notable personalities have already made the move to Bluesky, including Liberal Democrat technology spokesperson Layla Moran, actor Jamie Lee Curtis, comedian Dara Ó Briain and TV presenter Chris Packham. – November 18, 2024