Since the US election, Bluesky, a microblogging platform, has been gaining popularity as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter). Its user base has doubled since September, reaching 20 million by November 20. This puts it in competition with X, owned by Elon Musk, which has 611 million monthly active users, and Meta’s Threads, with 275 million monthly active users. Many users have expressed discomfort with Musk’s close alliance with President-elect Donald Trump, potentially contributing to the platform’s growth. In fact, a report estimates that 115,000 X accounts were deactivated in the US the day after the election. There are also concerns about Musk’s potential influence on federal policies and the government’s use of artificial intelligence, as he is reportedly considering appointing an AI czar. In contrast, Bluesky offers an open API, allowing its data to be used for training AI models. However, this has led to backlash, as a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face released a dataset containing one million public posts sourced from Bluesky’s Firehose API without user consent. This sparked a wave of criticism and eventually led to the dataset being deleted and an apology being issued. Despite this incident, Bluesky clarified that it does not use user content to train its models and respects the concerns of artists and creators who have made their home on the platform. They also emphasized that Bluesky is an open and public social network, similar to websites on the internet, and can specify whether they consent to outside companies crawling their data. With the platform’s growing popularity, it remains to be seen how it will continue to differentiate itself from other social media giants.
