Twitter rival Bluesky gains traction with 606% increase in mobile downloads

Twitter's co-founder and twice-former CEO, Jack Dorsey, is backing Bluesky, a decentralised communications app, which has become a rival to Elon Musk's Twitter. 

Bluesky has no single owner or leader and is not beholden to commercial or financial interests, making it less susceptible to censorship and data collection. The app had 628,000 mobile downloads in April, representing a 606% rise from March when it became available on Android in addition to iOS.

By comparison, Twitter had 14.9 million app downloads in April, a 2% increase from March. Bluesky has about 50,000 users, and it is unclear how the platforms will generate money. Subscriptions are a possibility, but the team has yet to reveal its financial plans.

Bluesky, which is currently invitation-only, underscores how Dorsey is now actively looking to disrupt what he helped create. Dorsey, who remains the CEO of payments platform Block (formerly called Square), is going head-to-head with Musk with two Twitter alternatives.

Advocates say that decentralised projects like Bluesky are less likely to collect and sell users’ data, and their main drawback is scale. The front-end apps built atop these decentralised platforms are often clunky, not professional-looking or easy to use.

Bluesky was originally incubated within Twitter back in 2019 when Dorsey was still CEO. The app runs on a decentralised networking technology called the AT Protocol. In theory, the protocol could power future social apps, enabling people to maintain their identities across multiple apps.

In February 2022, members of the Bluesky project created the Bluesky Public Benefit LLC, with Jay Graber as CEO and Dorsey as one of the founding board members. The company announced on Twitter in April 2022 that it received $13 million in funding “to ensure we have the freedom and independence to get started on R&D.”

The move from centralised platforms with a nice user experience to decentralised platforms that are hard to use is driven by the desire for self-governance. The other decentralized social projects that have been getting more attention include Mastodon, as well as Lens and Farcaster, which are both Twitter substitutes built on blockchains. They don’t sell ads and don’t collect and sell user data, which are the classic ways that social networks make money.