Bluesky Now Has 24 Million Users. Jay Graber Is Still Vowing to Keep It From Enshittification

Have seen the blue sky There was a huge increase in the weeks after the US election. As of Tuesday, there were 24 million users on the social media platform. With high involvement comes great responsibility, which means Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has to do a lot to retain her. Promise not to “enshitify” the platform and advertising while still funding its explosive growth.

On Tuesday, during a major interview with Wired in San Francisco, she vowed to keep that promise and said the company remained “focused on making sure it’s a good experience.” [for users] As we scale,” she said.

Enshittification, as it is known, often occurs as social media platforms expand and need to extract money from users to please investors and stay afloat. Since Bluesky doesn’t plan to run ads, Wired senior writer Kate Knibbs asked, how does Bluesky plan to make money? “Subscription is the first step,” Graeber said, referring to a plan For example, let users pay regularly to upload higher-quality videos or access certain custom features.

With that in mind, Graeber acknowledged that recent user growth has delayed the rollout of premium subscriptions. When asked if the feature would be rolling out soon, she responded: “That’s the plan, but we’ve had a lot of growth recently.”

Bluesky was a social media experiment hatched within Twitter, but the company was fully independent before Elon Musk acquired its former parent company and renamed it X. Musk’s acquisitions X’s Bluesky gains new users as social media alternative, despite Musk throwing out a strong support Behind Donald Trump, blue skies begin to attract millions of new users.

period Post-election surgeBluesky’s 20 full-time employees sometimes struggled to cope with the influx of traffic, and the site temporarily crashed several times. As the business continues to grow, Bluesky is now better able to handle its user base without interruption. in the most recent Platform Gaming Newsletter Interview with Casey Newtonthe company said it has increased the number of content reviewers it works with, from 25 contractors to 100.

One of the distinguishing features of Bluesky is its decentralized platform Focus on user customization and control. It’s easy to adjust what you want to see with user lists, starter packs, and muted words. Advanced users can even choose to set up their own website hosting provider if they decide to go through with this process.

Although Bluesky currently captures the zeitgeist, Meta’s Threads (another Twitter/X alternative) Continuous growth And the size is still much larger. Meta spokesman Alec Booker told Wired via email that more than 35 million new users signed up for Threads in November. Feeling the pressure of competition, Meta announced the following plans: More customization options to be added to the thread.