What is Bluesky? The new social media network explained

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What is Bluesky? The new social media network explained

If you’ve found that

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/X has become an unsavory place since Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform in October 2022, then Bluesky may be the alternative you’ve been waiting for.

Originally started as a side project by

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founder Jack Dorsey,

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has since gone on to emass a staggering user base of more than 31.3 million users as of February 2025 with no signs of slowing down any time soon.

Whether your friends and family have migrated over, or you just want to see what all the fuss is about, TechRadar’s here to explain Bluesky in detail so you can see whether the social media platform is right for you. For even more info, you can see how Bluesky compares to

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.

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

When was Bluesky founded?

Bluesky debuted in 2019 as an experiment from

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founder Jack Dorsey, originally billed as a research project looking into ways of possibly decentralizing

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. By early 2021, the project had amassed a staff of around 50 people, and funding of $13 million from the parent company, which was used in part to hire Jay Graber, the current CEO of Bluesky since August 2021.

It was not launched to the public until February 6, 2024 where users could sign up to the platform, originally via invitation, before you could sign up by conventional means. Releasing around 18 months after Elon Musk bought

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(later rebranding it to X), the platform was seen as something of a safe haven from the new direction that the former was being taken in.

During this initial launch *******, Bluesky had a rough daily active install base of between one and 10 million users throughout the first half of 2024, with its popularity exploding towards the end of that year. Former

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CEO Jack Dorsey left Bluesky Social in May 2024, stepping down to pursue othe projects. By November 2024, the social media platform had grown to over 20 million users.

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(Image credit: Shutterstock/JR des)

What is Bluesky Social?

Bluesky is described as an “open network” social media platform that utilizes a singular account and a streamlined easy-to-use flow, giving users greater control over their feeds and preferences when compared to

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/X.

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Its users can follow profiles to add their posts to the news feed, as well as send direct messages which should be immediately familiar to anyone who has experience with older social media platforms.

Similarly to

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, Bluesky has a strict 300-word character limit for posts, and you can upload up to four images at a time, so the user experience should be fairly straightforward if coming from one account to another.

However, Bluesky also incentivizes the creation of threads to engage in longer posts. Videos are handled in a near-identical manner, too; up to 60 seconds in length, and strictly one per post. Regardless of type, you can have up to eight hashtags used in a post, be that text, image-based, or video. You can also repost.

What makes Bluesky different?

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(Image credit: Future)

Where Bluesky differs is with its suite of features. Getting started doesn’t necessarily mean rebuilding from the ground up; users have access to create and share what’s known as “Starter Packs” which can feature a careful curated list of people and topics. This could mean a list of people who were migrating over from

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(some users even sharing the same handle), or notable names in the fields of music, video games, news, and more.

Bluesky users can also create custom feeds by creating lists which can also influence the main Discover feed (as well as impact algorithmic feeds). In short, if you engage with specific types of content, you will see more of it. A common complaint of Musk’s X is that users may be shown content from accounts they did not follow, something that the newer platform is attempting to cut down on (if not outright eradicate).

The Feeds tab is an important part of Bluesky. You may be prompted to use the Discover tab, backed directly by

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itself (with more than 36,000 likes), or engage in curated Science, News, and Artists feeds instead. One of its most popular feeds is Blacksky, an algorithmic feed made to promote ****** users on the network, which anyone can add to by utilizing a specified hashtag, #Blacksky appropriately. A similar approach is taken towards what’s known as Clusters (manually added groups of users).

Where

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/X and Meta’s suite of social media platforms (

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,

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, Threads) utilize a checkmark verification system, Bluesky does away with this. Instead, users can self-verify on the network by naming their account after an established domain and proving ownership. Bluesky handles can include full website names which can make things more straightforward; the site has provided a

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if you want to know more about the process. Considering one of Musk’s more controversial decisions was to effectively make blue checkmarks a paid perk, this alternative seems to make sense.

What are the downsides of Bluesky?

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(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Arguably the largest downside of Bluesky Social is its notably smaller install base when compared to its contemporaries such as

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,

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,

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, and Threads. While the network has grown exponentially in the year since its public launch in February 2024, now amassing over 30 million users, it is still dwarfed by its rivals.

Launched by Meta on July 5, 2023, Threads (also billed as a

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/X alternative) has a monthly user base of around 300 million users with around 100 million daily users. That means that Bluesky is around 10 times smaller than a very similar product on the market, despite not being a replacement for

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in our opinion.

As a result, some users of Bluesky have said that the actual content on the platform can feel lacking when compared to more established social media networks that have been around considerably longer. If you primarily want to use Bluesky to keep up with what your friends and family are doing then this is likely to be less of an issue, however, as an out-and-out replacement for

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/X, it may be lacking in this area.

Bluesky takes what is called a

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as of March 2024. It works in partnership with the open-source moderation tool known as Ozone, where both teams and individuals can collaborate to independently review and label content appropriately according to the

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. While admirable in nature, this decentralized approach to blocking and filtering content by making it the users’ responsibility, can mean there can be the potential for misinformation and bias (however inadvertent).

Published in January 2025, the

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outlines that the company has scaled its moderation team to “roughly 100 moderators” and will “continue to hire more staff”. The site grew from 2.89 million to 25.94 million users that year alone, with a 17x increase in reports on the previous year. As such, there have been fears that gaps could arise in blocking potentially inappropriate or hateful content on the platform. It’s described as “developing” and therefore, unfinished.

As such, users should be mindful with what they post and diligent in reporting anything that doesn’t look right or breaks community guidelines.

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#Bluesky #social #media #network #explained

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