As Instagram's new Twitter rival Threads soars into the double-digit millions after launching on Wednesday, another Twitter alternative has itself reached a milestone: Bluesky has topped one million downloads across iOS and Android, even though the invite-only app remains in such a status.

Of course, that number is dwarfed by what Threads is outputting as an app tied into Instagram's social graph. And far from catching up to Twitter itself, which added another 72 million first-time installs while Bluesky was working toward its first million. That's an average of 518,000 new downloads per day for Twitter, data.ai notes. Compared to that, Bluesky only sees 8,300 first-time installs per day on average.

Still, that's pretty good growth for an app where invites remain scarce and, sometimes, unusable-the company even temporarily paused sign-ups during the first weekend in July after Twitter's decision to limit the number of readable tweets drove new demand for Twitter alternatives. The Bluesky team fears performance issues because the latter has not yet prepared such massive new users, an insider explained at the time.
In fact, reported by data.ai, hitting a new milestone for them allowed the move by Twitter with an estimated 300,000 new Bluesky installs registered since June 30.

This comes with a breakdown of U.S. accounting for 40 percent of the highest Bluesky installs. This is followed by Brazil at 9.5 percent, Japan at 8.5 percent, Thailand at 7.5 percent and United Kingdom at 4.6 percent.

Taking approximately four months to get the downloads to "1 million+", it is however more probable that the rate of adoption would have been higher had the app gone full-blown public open-up. That could come at a long-term cost now that Threads is out and promising to integrate with ActivityPub, the protocol powering the open-source, decentralized social network Mastodon, another popular alternative to Twitter. In the meantime, Bluesky is building its own decentralized social networking protocol, called the AT Protocol.

Although it has already experienced moderation issues, Bluesky is far from being ruled out. The company announced this week $8 million in seed funding and its first paid service, custom domains, as it seeks a monetization outside the traditional ad-supported market.