NYT: How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth (Gift Link)

[Dennis Donovan]

NYT - How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth

The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. 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

By Mike Isaac
Mike Isaac has used Bluesky since shortly after it launched last year.

Nov. 17, 2024
Updated 2:18 p.m. ET

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.

But lately, it has been anything but slow and steady.

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.

“We as a team take pride in our ability to scale quickly,” Jay Graber, 33, the chief executive of Bluesky, said in an interview. “But there’s always some growing pains.” She added that the app — which is still dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram and X — was adding more than one million new users a day.

Bluesky is surging amid upheaval in the social media world. After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he morphed it into X, changing many of its functions and alienating some of its most loyal users. Threads, an app similar to X that Meta introduced last year, relies mostly on an opaque algorithmic curation that reduces politics from people’s feeds. That has caused some people to head to other networks, including Bluesky, to discuss hot-button social issues.

/snip

Emily
‪@emilyliu.me‬
“The state of most social platforms right now is that users are locked in and developers are locked out. We want to build something that makes sure users have the freedom to move and developers have the freedom to build.” — @jay.bsky.team in @nytimes.com

November 17, 2024 at 2:48 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/emilyliu.me/post/3lb66dxgmss25

[mainer]

1. American (Half Chinese, half Swiss), born in Tulsa, software engineer

33 years old. And her name in Mandarin, Lantian, means “Blue Sky.” Fascinating.
(Wikipedia)

[mainer]

2. And the chief operating officer is a young woman, too!

For once, a tech company headed up by 2 women, not bros!

[mainer]

3. And the chief operating officer is a young woman, too!

For once, a tech company headed up by 2 women, not bros!