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There is now a de-facto alternative to X. Bluesky user numbers have more than doubled since the US election, and the social network is now pulling in about a million new people a day. This week it overtook Threads, operated by Meta, in daily active users in the US. The proximate cause is people seeking to detach themselves from X after Elon Musk helped Trump to victory in this month’s election. The irony is that Bluesky began inside X. Musk’s predecessor, Jack Dorsey, conceived of Bluesky in 2019 as a research project to decentralise Twitter. Two years later it launched as its own company with Jay Graber, whose Mandarin name means “blue sky”, as CEO. For now, the site is still a young pretender. Bluesky’s 20 million users pale in comparison to the 600 million people Musk says are on X. But some may value a quieter life.
