Welcome to The Debrief with Mat Honan, your weekly take on the tech news that really matters, links to stories we love, and the occasional recommendat

The rise of Bluesky, and the splintering of social

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2024-11-19 04:00:05

Welcome to The Debrief with Mat Honan, your weekly take on the tech news that really matters, links to stories we love, and the occasional recommendation.

If you’re not familiar, Bluesky is, essentially, a Twitter clone that publishes short-form status updates. It gained more than 2 million users this week. On Wednesday, The Verge reported it had crossed 15 million users. By Thursday, it was at 16 million. By Friday? 17 million and counting. It was the number one app in Apple’s app store.

Meanwhile, Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, put up even bigger numbers. The company’s Adam Mosseri reported that 15 million people had signed up in November alone. Both apps are surging in usage.

Many of these new users were seemingly fleeing X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. On the day after the election, more than 115,000 people deactivated their X accounts, according to Similarweb data. That’s a step far past not logging on. It means giving up your username and social graph. It’s nuking your account versus just ignoring it.

Millions of people have fled the “bird site” owned by Elon Musk and flocked to decentralized social media services instead.