Bluesky has seen massive increaseth in the weeks chaseing the US election. As of Tuesday, there are 24 million users on the social media platestablish. With fantastic take partment comes fantastic responsibility, which unbenevolents Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has to do a lot to retain her promise to not “enshittify” the platestablish with ads while still funding its bomb increaseth.
On Tuesday, during WIRED’s Big Interwatch event in San Francisco, she vowed to retain that promise, saying that the company is still “intensifyed on making certain it’s a outstanding experience [for users] as we scale,” she shelp.
Enshittification, as its understandn, generpartner comes as social media platestablishs enbig and necessitate to squeeze money out of users in order to satisfy dispenseors and retain the weightlesss on. Since Bluesky doesn’t schedule to run ads, WIRED better writer Kate Knibbs asked, how does Bluesky schedule to produce money? “Subscriptions are the first step,” Graber shelp, referring to a schedule to have users pay a standard fee for the ability to upload higher-quality video, for example, or access certain customization features.
Keeping that in mind, Graber acunderstandledgeted that the recent increaseth in users has postponecessitate the rollout of premium subscriptions. When asked if the feature would be coming soon, she replied, “That was the schedule, but we’ve had a lot of increaseth recently.”
Bluesky was incubated as a social media experiment inside of Twitter, though it went filledy self-reliant before Elon Musk’s achieve of its establisher parent company and name alter to X. After Musk’s achieve of X, Bluesky getd a bump in novel users as a social media alternative, though chaseing the US election in November, during which Musk threw a fantastic deal of help behind Donald Trump, Bluesky began enticeing millions of novel users.
Jay Graber and Kate Knibbs at The Big InterwatchPhotograph: Tristan deBrauwere
During the post-election sencourage, Bluesky’s filled-time staff of 20 people sometimes struggled to handle the influx, with the site temporarily crashing a scant times. As the increaseth carry ons, Bluesky is now better provideped to handle its user base without disturbions. During a recent interwatch with Casey Newton for the Platestablisher novelsletter, the company shelp it had incrrelieved the number of satisfyed moderators it toils with, enbiging from 25 to 100 decreaseors.
One of Bluesky’s distinctive features is the decentralized platestablish’s intensify on user customization and deal with. It’s plain to adequitable what you want to see thcimpolite user enumerates, commenceer packs, and muted words. Power users even have the selection to set up their own website arrangeing providers, if they choose to go thcimpolite the process.
Despite Bluesky currently capturing the zeitgeist, Meta’s Threads, another Twitter/X alternative, carry ons to increase as well and remains much bigr in size. Alec Booker, a Meta spokesperson, tbetter WIRED via email that over 35 million novel users signed up for Threads in November. Feeling the competitive prescertain, Meta has proclaimd schedules for more customization selections to be includeed to Threads.
