Social network and X competitor Bluesky's strong growth slowed in December after surging from more than 9 million users in the U.S. in September to more than 20 million in November.
This slowdown is based on an analysis of web traffic and mobile app daily active user numbers by analytics firm Similarweb, which found that Bluesky's growth rate was 189% in December 2024 compared to the previous month in November. It was found that the ratio was less than 10%.
Daily active users of the Bluesky mobile app in the U.S. also increased by 12% in December, compared to a 284% increase in November, the company said.
As of this writing, Bluesky has a total of 26.44 million users and has started adopting other X features such as Trending Topics.
The social network benefited late last year from the exodus of users from X (formerly Twitter) following the results of November's US presidential election. As Elon Musk deepens his ties with President-elect Donald Trump and leverages X to promote the Trump campaign, Bluer?) Moved to Bluesky in search of pastures.
The move propelled Bluesky's app to the top of the U.S. App Store charts in November, where it remained at No. 1 overall from November 13, 2024 to November 21, 2024, according to data from app intelligence provider Appfigures. .
As a result, in November, many Hollywood celebrities, musicians, writers and journalists joined the social network, and Bluesky began to gain more attention among the mainstream.
Data now shows that the big blue sky bump is over and growth is starting to normalize.
Let's be clear: Bluesky is still growing. According to Samelweb, Bluesky grew faster in the US in December than Instagram Threads, another of X's competitors. During the month, Bluesky desktop and mobile web visits in the US increased 9.6% month over month, while visits to Threads.net decreased 1.6%. (Note that Meta acquired the Threads.com domain in September but continues to redirect to Threads.net).
Globally, the number of website visits to Bluesky's app increased by 9.5% month-on-month in December 2024. This was also driven by growth in the United States. This is higher than Threads' 5.7% growth and X's 2.4% growth, data from Similarweb shows.
Bluesky's increase in usage is due to user protests over its moderation policies, issues with bot participation on the platform, and malicious actors such as username squatting and impersonation, which the company has tried to address with recent app updates. Other moves by the company mean the app is currently facing growing pains.
Despite the slowdown in December, Bluesky still delivered strong growth for 2024 as a whole, posting 930% year-over-year growth globally. Again based on website visits, the two-year growth rate was 30,564%.