Amid X exodus, Bluesky CEO says 1M people per day joined in past week

(The Hill) -- The social media platform Bluesky has emerged as a popular alternative for users departing Elon Musk's X and other platforms, with nearly 1 million people joining each day over the past week, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said Tuesday.

"We've been scaling up. There's been about a million people joining a day for the past week, and we've just been telling people how it works, showing them how it's different," Graber said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday.

"A lot of people are saying they're having a lot more fun here. They're having an experience where they're making friends online again and talking to people. That is just something that they haven't experienced in a long time," she added.

The surge comes amid a mass exodus of users from X. Thousands of users, including well-known celebrities and companies, announced they were either quitting or deactivating their X accounts shortly after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory earlier this month, citing a “toxic” or "disturbing" content environment.   

When asked if Bluesky was intended to have a distinct tone and environment from X, Graber said, "Our goal is to give users an experience where they can have fun and feel safe."

"So, we've already always focused a lot on trust and safety, making sure that users have ability to have an experience that's free from bots and harassment and spam and then — that's, I think, really core [to] the experience," she continued. "But then beyond that, we want a place where people can express their creativity, and so they can come on and explore an 'app store' basically of all these feeds."

Graber explained that users can subscribe to feeds they are interested in, comparing them to magazine subscriptions.

Musk, who quickly became one of Trump's most visible allies, has faced repeated criticism over the changes he made to X's content moderation policies, which included the reinstatement of several suspended accounts and a scaling back of some moderation measures.

Coupled with his recent embrace of far-right views and sharing of some conspiracy theories, some users and media experts said X is no longer a place for balanced and accurate information.

Some have called X an "echo chamber" of right-wing ideologies. When asked how Bluesky will avoid becoming this, Graber said the focus is on "giving people a way to productively engage."

"And so, making sure that it's an environment where discussions can happen and people can have different opinions, but people aren't getting harassed, and it's a place where people can split off and form their own communities and it's really up to the user on what they want to do."

Bluesky was founded with the help of former X CEO Jack Dorsey. It was released as an invite-only app for iOS and Android users in early 2023. It opened to all users in February.

The Hill reached out to X for comment.