Bluesky against Threads: this is the battle to inherit X’s space

X is not going through his best moment. When tycoon Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, the little bird’s social network had about 368 million users around the world, according to Statista estimates. The latest numbers relating to 2024 speak of 335 million. Your competitors have smelled blood. Both Threads and Bluesky are trying to fish in troubled waters. They all want to establish themselves as the digital agora of reference, an unofficial title that X has held for years, and continues to hold.

The owner and head of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, last week gave official data for the first time about Threads, the platform he launched just a year and a half ago to compete with X in the micro-message social media market. “Threads’ strong momentum continues. Now it has more than 300 million monthly active users and 100 million daily active users,” he said on his social network. The Meta application is the great pursuer of X.

Meanwhile, the Bluesky fever seems to have stopped. After experiencing a few weeks of vertigo starting on November 6, the day after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections, the social network created by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, has stagnated at 25 million users. users. Mastodon, for its part, is not competing in the race to occupy X’s space: it is a niche social network, which does not aspire to be the option of the general public.

The sustained fall of the leader

One of the first measures Musk took when he took control of Twitter was to fire more than half of the staff (which he is now threatening to do in the US with federal officials). The company’s global communications team entered into the adjustment, so there is no possible dialogue with the social network, beyond Musk’s own tweets. The de facto communication manager of X is its owner. That is one of the reasons that makes it difficult to know with any precision what the profile of the platform’s user base is. The most generous estimates give it more than 500 million users; the least favorable, about 200 million.

Despite the news closure, signs of X’s decline abound. Musk’s positioning as Trump’s patron and champion, with Before that, many users were already fed up with the incessant flow of misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate-inciting content that has run rampant for months without any type of control on the network.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the drop has been pronounced since Musk took sides in the riots experienced this summer in the United Kingdom, when the murder of three girls in Southport led to a wave of misinformation and racist hoaxes, followed by episodes of violence. against the Muslim population. The richest man in the world supported the proclamations of the far-right. “Civil war is inevitable,” he said in the midst of the crisis, while dozens of people tried to burn down a hostel where asylum seekers were staying.

According to Similarweb data collected by the Financial Timesdaily active users in the United Kingdom have increased from eight million to 5.6 million in the last year. A third of that loss has occurred since the summer riots. “The same thing is happening everywhere, and not just where the platform has been banned, like Brazil. In the last 16 months, users have fallen by 20% in the US,” reports the FT.

The data provided by X itself to Brussels (the Digital Services Law, DSA, obliges platforms to provide data every six months) on the users of its application in community territory confirm this trend. If in August 2023 they exceeded 112 million monthly active users, a year later, in August 2024, they had 106 million. It is expected that the next data that the company has to communicate, that of February, will continue along this line.

The chase

This is the context in which Threads and Bluesky have been operating, especially since November. Zuckerberg’s platform is much larger than the one Dorsey launched. Mainly, because Threads is linked to Instagram, also from Meta and which has 2,000 million users. Those who have an Instagram account do not need to register to use Threads, which has practically given them a critical mass on which to start their journey.

Threads says it has 300 million monthly active users, 25 million more than a month ago. Part of that growth may be due to some recent changes applied to the social network and inspired by Bluesky. For example, users can design feeds (the flow of messages seen on the screen) tailored, making it easier to follow certain topics. That is one of the star functions of Bluesky, as is another one that is especially useful for newcomers and that has also landed in Threads: the possibility of sharing lists of accounts to follow. “For us it is great to see that someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who has been on social networks for two decades, is inspired by our ideas,” Bluesky’s director of operations, Rose Wang, recently said in an interview in Morning Express.

Bluesky, for its part, added a million users in the first week after the US presidential elections. In the second, it added a million a day to its community. If on November 13 it had 15 million users, now it is close to 26. That frenetic pace of growth has been cut off. One of the unknowns of 2025 is whether the butterfly social network will grow again at an accelerated rate, probably boosted by events related to the Trump Administration that cause more leaks of users in X, or if the Bluesky phenomenon will deflate and remain as the meeting place for those disenchanted with Twitter.

The numbers suggest that neither Threads nor Bluesky will have an easy time surpassing X in size. Among other things, because many of the users who open an account on other platforms keep their X account inactive, but do not close it. 2025 will be the year in which we see if that surprise may or may not occur.