Bluesky, the Twitter competitor from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is installed on a million devices. The app will be available for four to five months and users can only create an account after an invitation from an existing Bluesky user.
Analytics company data.ai estimates that the app has received 300,000 new installations since the end of June. The company does not elaborate on the possible cause of this sharp increase, but during this period Twitter has taken two drastic, temporary measures. First, tweets were made inaccessible to users who are not logged into the platform. In addition, the platform recently introduced rate limits to prevent data collection, such as for training AI.
For context, data.ai reports that Twitter has added a total of 72 million first-time installs in the same period since Bluesky’s release in February. Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, also has one in about 24 hours 70 million new users welcomed.
Unlike Twitter, Bluesky is a decentralized social network. The app first became available for iOS and not much later also for Android. It is not yet known when the platform will be opened to a larger audience. Earlier this week, Bluesky also announced that it had arranged $8 million in financing. How Bluesky should make further money is still being considered. “We will experiment with different strategies and services to see what provides real value to our users and we will continue to share what we learn as we build a sustainable social network,” the company stated in that announcement.
Screenshots of Bluesky for Android, via Google Play