SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Disgruntled compared to established online spaces such as

Defended by former Twitter CEO Jack DorseyBluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. This invite-only period gave the site time to develop moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Musk’s X, with a “discovery” feed and a timeline feed for accounts users follow. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find “starter packs” that provide a curated list of people and personalized feeds to follow.

Bluesky said in mid-November that the total number of users jumped to 15 milliondown from around 13 million at the end of October, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and talk to others online. The post-election surge in users isn’t the first time Bluesky has benefited from X’s departure. The platform gained 2.6 million users in the week following X’s departure. banned in Brazil in August — 85% of them come from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in a single day in October, when X reported that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.

On the platform, new users – including journalists, left-wing politicians and celebrities – posted memes and said they looked forward to using a space free of ads and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of Twitter’s beginnings more than a decade ago.

Despite Bluesky’s growth,

Bluesky, however, has bigger ambitions than supplanting social networks to operate on different platforms – also known as interoperability –. such as emails, blogs or phone numbers.

Currently, you can’t switch between social platforms to leave a comment on someone’s account. Twitter users should stay on Twitter and TikTok users should stay on TikTok if they want to interact with accounts on those services. Big tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-driven business models.

Bluesky is trying to reinvent all of this and work towards interoperability.