X, once Twitter, is no longer the "digital town square" it once touted to be. Users unhappy with the direction of the app in the wake of the U.S. presidential election are flooding over to the competition, Bluesky.

Bluesky's decentralized social media platform has grown steadily from 9+ million users as of September to 14.6+ million as of Tuesday, with the latest surge occurring over the weekend as U.S. users fled X. 

The exodus briefly made Bluesky the No. 2 iPhone app in the US App Store on Monday, having risen from No. 27 the day after the elections. Today, it's dropped a little to No. 3, behind Meta's Threads and ChatGPT.

The rate of new sign-ups is also of interest. Yesterday, several outlets reported that Bluesky had added over 700,000 users in the last week, taking its total to 14.5 million. One day later, it's over 14.6 million, showing that roughly 100,000 users are joining each day.

Data, app intelligence firm Appfigures indicates has increased by 933% in year-to-date downloads for Bluesky in the US; X increased by 48%. Appfigures also reported on the same day that downloads for Bluesky for November 10th were 624% higher compared to downloads on November 1st. Tuesday, This week, Bluesky announced that 1 million have joined over the past week.

The majority of our new users are coming from the United States, Canada, and the U.K.," said Bluesky team member Emily Lu, in response to TechCrunch. "We're seeing increased activity levels across all different forms of engagement: likes, follows, new accounts, etc. We're excited to welcome these communities to Bluesky, which range from Swifties to sports fans to journalists. Users have also been sharing feedback that they're receiving more engagement — and higher-quality engagement — on Bluesky than on other platforms despite initially having more followers elsewhere," she added.

According to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, engagement tends to be higher on Bluesky than it is on X — and that isn't a recent phenomenon. Although X remains tall in the numbers because most users abandon but never delete their X accounts, Bluesky tends to retain a higher percentage of "posters" – that is, posters as opposed to lurkers, says Graber.

"We…have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven't dipped below ~30% posters," she said in a post on the social audio platform Bluesky on Tuesday. As a message to the new users, she recommends posting into relevant feeds, commenting on other people's posts, finding your mutuals or those you follow who also follow you in return, and using hashtags to raise interaction with your posts.

Change in user adoption follows changes that Elon Musk has made since he acquired the company formerly called Twitter back in fall 2022. The executive of Tesla and SpaceX first pledged to turn his $44 billion acquisition into a free-speech platform, one where "everyone's voice got heard." However, Musk used the app to amplify right-wing rhetoric, campaign for Trump, and suspend accounts at a rate significantly higher than ever, based on X's own transparency report data.

Although Musk may once have thought Twitter is an outfit for left-leaning users, he never made the app a more balanced social media platform. With things as they are, researchers found that even the owner's right-leaning political posts showed up in feeds for users who did not follow him or like his content on X.

This 204 million following has provided Musk a fantastic social reach through which to disseminate his own thinking regarding politics and to organize behind Trump.

Of course, some will worry that when deluged by liberals abandoning X, Bluesky itself will be or becomes a partisan platform, but the nature of how its platform has been built doesn't really lend itself to being driven by its owner's political views. In addition to the blocking and reporting functionality, which most social media and messaging apps are included in, Bluesky further allows users to create their own algorithms and feeds, which they can customize, and subscribe to their own moderation services, thus allowing users to make the app personalized. If Bluesky's app and moderation choices don't work for you, users will be in a position to host the social software on their own servers, similar to open source X competitor Mastodon (although Bluesky makes use of a different protocol, the AT protocol, as opposed to Mastodon and Threads' ActivityPub.).

Interest in Bluesky has been building for quite some time, and not just on account of the infrastructure and design. Past booms that helped Bluesky include when X was banned in Brazil and when Threads was flailing to keep up with the issues plaguing moderation, for instance. But this new spill is an indication that more left-leaning users are deciding to be done with X. And without the combative, back-and-forth political chatter that made Twitter famous, its future as the "global town square" appears increasingly in doubt.