Bluesky, the social media platform that managed to accomplish what others before it tried and failed - become the alternative to X - has a big problem. An Elon Musk shaped problem that I've talked about a few times in the last few months.
Some disagree, but it's pretty clear that Bluesky's growth follows Elon Musk's behavior. When Elon misbehaves, people try Bluesky, and when he's quiet, people don't.
It's not a terrible problem to have, but it makes it hard to get the traction it needs to see sustained growth.
Let me show you what I mean in terms of app downloads and web traffic. Yes, I've ventured out to the web for this!
Bluesky has seen a few all-time highs this year. The first came in September when X was banned in Brazil after Elon refused to comply with the government. The next came in October as Elon changed how blocking works, and the most recent - and by far biggest - came around election time.
But... that's all done now. Our estimates show weekly downloads dropping from an all-time high of 2.4M in mid-November to just 209K in the last week of December. That's a whole order of magnitude, or a 10x reduction.
Web traffic, which was provided to Appfigures by our friends at Semrush, seems to align with a peak in mid-November and a drop right after. A much higher peak of nearly 50M estimated users in a single week dropping to a smidge under 30M in the last week of December. Not as big of a drop as downloads, but still significant.
It's worth noting that X also saw a boost in web traffic around election time with weekly views growing to 1.8B, according to Semrush data
And in case you need any more data on this, stats collected directly from Bluesky's API agree, showing likes, posts, and follows peaked in mid-November and have dropped since.
I said a long time ago that web traffic = readers while mobile users = writers, and while that's a very rough generalization, it does fit with data collected from Bluesky's API showing a little more than 800K posters - a number which has been fairly consistent after hitting peak in mid-November.
And why is that? Because Elon hasn't done anything egregious. He's still posting a lot on X, but he and the platform itself haven't done much to alienate users.
I don't mean to be hard on Bluesky here at all. I'm on Bluesky (follow me) and think having more options is always better. I just hope the platform can start getting growth in a way that's more self-sustaining.
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