X Gets Another Rival as Bluesky Opens Its Doors to All

Social media platform Bluesky ran as an invite-only service in its first two years, so that its managers could maintain control over the platform and manage its evolution carefully as its user base grew slowly to around 3 million. That total should soar today, after it opened to anyone who wants to sign up. Your company should probably pay attention.

Back in 2022, when founder and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey revealed the launch of new microblogging site Bluesky, he said the goal wasn’t to combat Twitter, freshly purchased by the mercurial Elon Musk and rebranded as X. Instead the idea was to “collaborate” with it. Bluesky was an initiative that was actually started by Twitter-it even received $13 million in funding just before Musk bought Twitter. But in 2024, with X frequently and controversially in the news, and losing advertising partners, Dorsey’s assertions land a little differently.

The Bluesky app works differently than Twitter, from an under the hood tech perspective. Its website describes it as “social media as it should be.” Twitter’s data is all held centrally on its servers and broadcast, in a way, to its users and the internet at large, whereas Bluesky is decentralized and links to other decentralized social media platforms using an open standard. Digging behind the tech jargon, this means Bluesky is interconnected to other social networks that use the same standard: posts on Bluesky can be searched for, liked, shared and so on by users on different social platforms. It’s a kind of force multiplier: post one conversation on one platform, and gain access to other users on other platforms.

If that all sounds very inside baseball for social media tech, then the key takeaway is that this concept is relatively new. That means there’s room for clever companies and brands to experiment with how everything works, and perhaps establish a dominant presence on the platform ahead of the competition.

Any company that interacts with customers or clients online should probably at least check out Bluesky, if only because when Meta’s own Twitter killer Threads launched last year it became the fastest-downloaded app ever. Millions of users flocked to the new app, and brands quickly moved to embrace it as an alternative social platform to X. Some even suggested that Threads could be the end of Twitter. 

But Threads is still owned by Meta. While that brings some benefits, like technical expertise and a world-renowned backer, it doesn’t distance Threads from the controversies rocking its Meta stablemates Facebook and Instagram. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently had to answer stiff questions from critical senators in an inquiry into the potential harms that Meta’s apps caused to younger users.

Diversifying your company’s online social media efforts onto several platforms, including Bluesky, could be a good idea. The trick is to skate to where the puck is going to be. In this case that could be the millions of users Bluesky already has, and the potential millions more it may soon gain. It’s already gained some 800,000 new users since opening its doors publicly: that alone may tempt you to try it out.