Bluesky has seen massive growth in the weeks following the US election. As of Tuesday, there are 24 million users on the social media platform. With great engagement comes great responsibility, which means Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has to do a lot to keep her promise to not “enshittify” the platform with ads while still funding its explosive growth.
On Tuesday, during WIRED’s Big Interview event in San Francisco, she vowed to keep that promise, saying that the company is still “focused on making sure it’s a good experience [for users] as we scale,” she said.
Enshittification, as its known, generally comes as social media platforms expand and need to squeeze money out of users in order to please investors and keep the lights on. Since Bluesky doesn’t plan to run ads, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs asked, how does Bluesky plan to make money? “Subscriptions are the first step,” Graber said, referring to a plan to have users pay a regular fee for the ability to upload higher-quality video, for example, or access certain customization features.
Keeping that in mind, Graber admitted that the recent growth in users has delayed the rollout of premium subscriptions. When asked if the feature would be coming soon, she replied, “That was the plan, but we’ve had a lot of growth recently.”
Bluesky was incubated as a social media experiment inside of Twitter, though it went fully independent before Elon Musk’s purchase of its former parent company and name change to X. After Musk’s purchase of X, Bluesky received a bump in new users as a social media alternative, though following the US election in November, during which Musk threw a great deal of support behind Donald Trump, Bluesky began attracting millions of new users.
Jay Graber and Kate Knibbs at The Big InterviewPhotograph: Tristan deBrauwere
During the post-election surge, Bluesky’s full-time staff of 20 people sometimes struggled to handle the influx, with the site temporarily crashing a few times. As the growth continues, Bluesky is now better equipped to handle its user base without interruptions. During a recent interview with Casey Newton for the Platformer newsletter, the company said it had increased the number of content moderators it works with, expanding from 25 to 100 contractors.
One of Bluesky’s distinctive features is the decentralized platform’s focus on user customization and control. It’s simple to adjust what you want to see through user lists, starter packs, and muted words. Power users even have the option to set up their own website hosting providers, if they decide to go through the process.
Despite Bluesky currently capturing the zeitgeist, Meta’s Threads, another Twitter/X alternative, continues to grow as well and remains much larger in size. Alec Booker, a Meta spokesperson, told WIRED via email that over 35 million new users signed up for Threads in November. Feeling the competitive pressure, Meta has announced plans for more customization options to be added to Threads.