Bluesky

• 1. The Tweet That Started It

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  Bluesky was announced in 2019 not in a press release, but in a tweet. Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, posted on his own platform that social media might work better as an open protocol. His inspiration was an essay by writer Mike Masnick, titled "Protocols, Not Platforms".

  Masnick observed that social media platforms were caught in an impossible bind. They were accused simultaneously of permitting too much harmful speech and of censoring legitimate expression. His proposed fix was to shift control over content filtering to individual users rather than leaving it with centralized platforms.

  At Twitter, the first working group of decentralization experts, assembled in a Matrix group chat, failed to agree on a single path forward. That impasse is what opened the door to Jay Graber.

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• 2. Protocol and Proof

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  Jay Graber was hired in August 2021 to lead the Bluesky project. Her mandate was to build a communication protocol from scratch for a truly decentralized social network. Twitter had provided $13 million in initial funding. In May 2022, the team released early open-source code under an MIT license, making the development process visible to public scrutiny. The protocol was first called the Authenticated Data Experiment, or ADX, and later renamed the Authenticated Transfer Protocol.

  A Personal Data Server, one of three core services in the AT Protocol's architecture, stores each user's data in repositories built on a Merkle tree structure. It also handles authentication and manages signing keys for every account it hosts. A Relay works like an indexer on the web, gathering data from many Personal Data Servers and presenting it as a single unified stream. An AppView takes that stream and renders it into the interface that users actually see. Direct messages sit outside this architecture for now, handled by a central service, with end-to-end encryption planned for a future iteration.

  The Washington Post uses the domain "washingtonpost.com" as its Bluesky handle, a practical illustration of how the AT Protocol approaches identity verification. Rather than a purchased badge, users prove ownership by linking their account to a domain through a DNS text record or HTTPS page.

  CTO Paul Frazee described the platform's custom feeds option in 2023 as a "marketplace of algorithms". Users can choose or create algorithmic feeds tailored to their interests. Third-party developers have built tools such as Skyfeed and BlueskyFeeds.com for finding and publishing these feeds.

  Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko and Graber have discussed collaboration on interoperability between their two platforms. A reporter from The New Yorker found in 2025 that each appeared more interested in having the other migrate onto their own protocol.

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• 3. Invitation and Identity

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  Bluesky launched as an invitation-only iOS beta on the 17th of February 2023. Android access followed in April, by which point the platform had attracted around 50,000 users.

  Black users, artists, left-wing users, transgender users, sex workers, and furry communities were among the earliest to establish a presence on the platform. Each found that the controlled invitation system gave them space to shape the culture before larger crowds arrived. Rose Wang, the company's COO, later said the company had actively worked to "develop and nurture a set of power users who can help evangelize and help us really tell … and reinforce the culture" these early communities built. The app's code was made open source under the MIT license in May 2023, with some server software also released under a dual Apache license.

  In July 2023, users discovered that racial slurs could appear in user handles and that the platform had removed such slurs from its list of flagged words. A "posting strike" followed, with users refusing to engage until the company responded. Bluesky Social issued a public apology, updated its terms of service to prohibit conduct targeting people based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation, and created a dedicated trust and safety team.

  December 2023 brought a new visual identity. The cloudy sky stock image that had served as the platform's logo was replaced by a blue butterfly, drawn from the emoji users had already adopted across the internet to signal their Bluesky handles. The platform remained invitation-only until the 6th of February 2024, when registrations opened to anyone.

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• 4. Elon Musk Events

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  Developers at Bluesky Social coined a name for the pattern that emerged after the platform opened to the public: "Elon Musk Events", or EMEs. Each time X, formerly Twitter, made a controversial decision, users arrived at Bluesky in significant numbers.

  In August 2024, Brazilian courts ordered X blocked in that country. Bluesky gained over four million new users in Brazil within two weeks, becoming the most downloaded app in both the Brazilian App Store and Play Store. Brazilian daily active users then dropped below two million by October, a rapid reversal that showed how quickly the pattern could unwind.

  October 2024 brought a second EME. X updated its Terms of Service to allow user content to be used for AI training by default, and also changed its block feature. More than 1.2 million people joined Bluesky within two days. The platform announced it had reached 13 million total users on the 24th of October.

  The largest EME followed the United States presidential election on the 5th of November 2024. Donald Trump won a second, non-consecutive term, with Elon Musk having been his largest individual campaign donor. Millions of users from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada moved to Bluesky in the weeks that followed. By the 13th of November, the platform was adding roughly one million users per day. It crossed 20 million users on the 19th of November, tripling its total within three months. That same October, Bluesky had announced a $15 million Series A financing round led by Blockchain Capital, pledging to keep cryptocurrency out of the service entirely.

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• 5. Surge and Retreat

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  On the 16th of November 2024, Bluesky Safety reported that in the previous 24 hours the platform had received more than 42,000 moderation reports. That was an all-time single-day record. In all of 2023, the annual total had been 360,000. The company was fielding roughly 3,000 reports per hour. Rose Wang said the company's focus during the surge was keeping the platform operational while maintaining the integrity of its moderation policies. Servers were temporarily overloaded, and Bluesky acquired additional capacity to stay online.

  Registered users climbed to 30 million by the end of January 2025, crossed 35 million by April, and reached over 38.5 million by August 2025. Daily activity told a different story. By September 2025, daily active users had fallen 40 percent from a March 2025 peak of 2.5 million to 1.5 million. An the 24th of April 2025 outage lasting about an hour illustrated the pressures of operating a rapidly scaled service. Sensor Tower estimated that in the second quarter of 2025, Bluesky's daily user base was roughly one tenth the size of X's.

  The New Yorker cited Bluesky's own open-source data in September 2025 to report that daily posters had declined every month since January 2025. That January peak had followed Donald Trump's inauguration. A Slate report from the same period described many registered accounts as having become effectively inactive.

  A May 2025 analysis by the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation found Bluesky adoption concentrated on the left. The study also found news influencers on X were far more active than their counterparts on Bluesky. On the 17th of October 2025, several Trump administration agencies began posting on Bluesky. The Department of Homeland Security included a video clip of CEO Jay Graber saying "Bluesky's for everyone" in one of its first posts. That phrase had been Graber's response to a journalist asking whether Donald Trump would be welcome on the platform.

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• 6. Running a Public Good

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  Bluesky Social PBC is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, though the company describes itself as decentralized and runs no physical head office. As of September 2025, its staff numbered 29 people. It is structured as a benefit corporation, legally permitted to direct profits toward the public good. It is not obligated to maximize returns to shareholders. Jay Graber holds the largest ownership stake in the company.

  No advertising existed on the platform as of December 2024. Graber has publicly stated that Bluesky will not "enshittify the network with ads". As of April 2025, the only active revenue stream was charging users to host their accounts on custom domains. Plans for an optional subscription service and user-to-user payment tools have been discussed publicly. On the 5th of July 2023, the company announced an $8 million seed funding round led by Neo. The funds were pledged toward growing the team, managing infrastructure, and developing the AT Protocol further.

  Board members in late 2024 included Graber, Jeremie Miller, Mike Masnick, and Kinjal Shah. Jack Dorsey posted on the 4th of May 2024 that he had left Bluesky Social's board. In an interview, Dorsey said the company was "literally repeating all the mistakes Twitter/X made as a company". He also criticized its corporate structure and the introduction of moderation tools into the AT Protocol. On the 9th of March 2026, Graber stepped down as CEO, replaced on an interim basis by venture capitalist Toni Schneider.

  In August 2025, the platform blocked access in Mississippi rather than comply with a state law requiring age verification for all users. Bluesky said the law created "significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies". Access was restored in December 2025, with users required to confirm they were over 18. Several other states, including South Dakota, Wyoming, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia, implemented similar requirements in the months that followed. In July 2025, Bluesky began age verification in the United Kingdom under the Online Safety Act 2023. The process used Kids Web Services, a system provided by Epic Games. In early April 2025, Turkish courts ordered 44 Bluesky accounts blocked. By mid-April, Bluesky had hidden 18 accounts and 2 posts from users in Turkey.

  When Bluesky launched opt-in push notifications in July 2025, the company featured The Athletic as its showcase example. Nieman Lab observed that sports was "not just a top priority but the top priority" for the platform. That choice pointed toward Bluesky's effort to build engaged audiences that would outlast the political surges.

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