Why this app is perfect if you're tired of X and Elon Musk.

In the war for dissatisfied users of the platform once known as Twitter, Bluesky had a great week. The decentralized social network has added at least 1 million users in the last seven days. This growth is the latest point on a trend line: If Elon Musk either improved the ease of use of In October, Bluesky added 500,000 users in one day after Musk toned down X's “block” feature. Bluesky also grew significantly when Musk announced in September 2023 (so far without doing so) that his website would be putting up a paywall. There was also strong support when Musk battled Brazil's Supreme Court in August.

Bluesky hasn't exactly won the Twitter wars. By conventional standards it doesn't come close. The platform reports a total of around 14.5 million users. This is reported by Meta's Threads, which was built on the framework of Instagram 275 Millions in a given month. But the Twitter wars are really a series of small border skirmishes, and Bluesky has momentum in one big battle: the battle for news and live events.

Threads like Musk's X are hostile to both news organizations and news as a concept. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has made it clear since Threads launched in fall 2023 that the platform would not be friendly to news and politics. Meta made sure of that last year. It seems impossible to keep the Threads app in an environment where a user only sees posts from accounts they follow. External links do not propagate well in the site's algorithmic feeds. To the extent that Threads is a home for “news,” it is because it is a hub for the weirdest liberal election conspiracy theories out there. Threads is well-received by politically-simple influencers and people who understandably just want to try out an app linked to their Instagram account. It's a black hole for messaging.

Then what is Bluesky? Until this week, you could think of it as a small, clean lifeboat sitting next to a sinking cruise ship where most of the passengers also had norovirus.

For more than a year, Bluesky has been the boat for left-leaning Twitter refugees who were so fed up with Musk that they decided, in front of the masses, to stop staying on his platform. This might have some echo chamber effects, but such an outcome would be no worse than from the nastiest people on the internet on reporter. The discourse there has steadily deteriorated, but those using power have not fled en masse.

But as X sinks deeper into a racist fever dream and Threads continues to build out its groundbreaking text app for influencers, Bluesky keeps building. The site's early users built sizeable communities there. They have tried to infuse the app with social norms, for example by encouraging users to post alternative text to their images so that blind users can interact with them. They've even given Bluesky its own lore, a fundamental piece for any social media site that wants to achieve something. (When you arrive on Bluesky this month, you'll see posts about a sensual pig named Alf. That's just part of the place.)

The small team that runs Bluesky has packed it with features that are not only good, but are a direct rejection of the things its competitors are bad at. Musk allows blocked users to see the posts of the person who blocked them? Here's Bluesky with a feature known colloquially as “nuclear block,” which makes any argument impossible with a person who has stated they don't want to talk to you. Threads forcing algorithmic scrolling down your throat? Here Bluesky is without any algorithmic feeds, just customizable timelines that users can opt in or curate themselves. Musk's posts are up

Bluesky seems to remember something important that once made Twitter successful: news and sports. Twitter knew full well that these spaces were its bread and butter. Verification badges were introduced after a baseball executive sued the platform for helping someone impersonate him. The result was a system that allowed users to easily verify the authenticity of accounts. It was The public space for live sports because it was the only place where people could exchange real-time ooohs and aaahs and complaints about an offensive coordinator's play-calling on a Sunday afternoon. Twitter's growth accelerated when enough people realized it was the place for everything from updates about a hurricane making landfall to conversations about a late-night Portland Trail Blazers game.

Now let's go back. Bluesky does not trap users in non-chronological feeds. It only gives people what they ask for, in real time. It turns out that when a lot of people get into the fray, it creates a feeling of controlled but wholesome chaos that's similar to what Twitter felt like to some of its former addicts around 2014 or 2015. I've been at Bluesky for more than a year, but can't say I was seriously into it until this past weekend when I noticed that the college football viewing audience was much more energetic and fun than what I saw this fall X had seen.

Ultimately, more power users should migrate, in part because Bluesky doesn't throttle access to their work in the way that X, Meta and Google have so often done. There are no bought and paid for blue ticks flooding the zone. Bluesky makes no effort to demote posts with links. It encourages members of the news and sports media to spend time there and bring their audiences with them. As journalist Matt Pearce put it, “It's hard to describe how grateful I am as a journalist to have a text-based app that doesn't suppress hyperlinks.” I don't know if people realize exactly how hostile the corporate internet has become to news is.” Bluesky was an innovator in building a social media site that doesn't care about being useless to people who spread news or try to consume it.

The platform already acts as a place where people enjoy spending time online, with a more personalized experience and less online waste than on is not Help Donald Trump return to power or remove more features that once made Twitter popular. “Fight cryptofascism by leaving X” is a nice pitch, but one that would make most normal people stare at you with their mouths agape.

Bluesky is conquering a segment of the Internet not because it is ideological, but because it is customizable and gives people more control over their online experience. It hasn't displaced For now, it's a nice place to hang out with friends on the Internet, catch up on news without being confused, and take a quick break from thinking about Elon Musk.

Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter.