The fledgling social media site has been flooded by people seeking alternatives to Facebook, X and Threads. It hasn’t all been easy. Jay Graber, Blu

Bluesky Is Growing Up. Maybe Too Fast.

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2024-11-17 17:30:22

The fledgling social media site has been flooded by people seeking alternatives to Facebook, X and Threads. It hasn’t all been easy.

Jay Graber, Bluesky’s chief executive, said there had been some “growing pains” as new users flooded the site. Credit... via Bluesky

In February 2023, a half-dozen techies introduced a social network prototype in an invitation-only launch. They deliberately debuted their creation, Bluesky, with little fanfare so that they could closely manage its growth.

Over the past week, Bluesky’s growth has exploded, more than doubling to 15 million-plus users as people seek alternatives to X, Facebook and Threads. It has rocketed to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores as the most downloaded free app. Its ascent has been so rapid that the company has been forced to grow up practically overnight.

Bluesky’s 20 full-time employees have been working around the clock to deal with the issues that come with hyper-growth: site outages, glitches in the code and content moderation issues. Most importantly, they have been trying to keep early users happy as new members have flooded in.