Bluesky, the social network and X competitor, has been benefiting from a wave of departures from the Elon Musk-owned app formerly known as Twitter. To date, Bluesky has reached a major milestone: it's surpassed 20 million users. More importantly, new data suggests the app's meteoric growth is allowing it to close in on another top X competitor, Instagram Threads, in metrics ranging from daily active users to web visitors.

The user base still lags far behind Threads, which recently reported north of 275 million monthly active users. However, if the growth rate at which Bluesky is growing holds up, in time, market intelligence firm Similarweb believes, it may catch up with Threads.

Its data shows that Threads had five times more daily active users than Bluesky before the US elections, but on November 15, which was a peak day for Bluesky, its lead over Bluesky was down to 1.5x in the US (Daily active users include mobile-apps on both iOS and Android, not website visitors.)

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri claimed that the data in question from Similarweb was inaccurate, but Meta does not publish DAUs.

Still, Musk-owned app X leads the pack, for now, with a daily U.S. active user count larger by more than 10 times than that of Bluesky.

Company data also shows Bluesky surpassed Threads for daily website visits in both the US and the UK, a sign of healthy interest from potential new users. Compared to the rest of the world, daily website visits on Bluesky have not yet outpaced Threads' as of mid-November but came very close.

Adoption of the Bluesky mobile app is growing, as well, Similarweb reports. After the election and through November 15, usage of Bluesky’s app in the U.S. grew 519% compared with the first 10 months of the year, it said. The U.K. also saw a spike, with usage up by 352%.

On the U.S. App Store, Bluesky became the No. 1 app on November 13 and has retained the position since, according to the provider of app intelligence, Appfigures. That means it leads Threads, which has reached No. 4, and X, which ranks 41. This must also have to do with Bluesky's rate of growth, not the sheer number of app downloads alone, because App Store charts reward a combination of the number of installs and the pace of those installs alongside other metrics.

Globally-on Android devices, that is-the firm said its Bluesky app usage is up more than 360% from where it was in the first half of the year. The pattern here seems different, as the influx of Brazilian users during the time X was banned in Brazil led Bluesky's daily active users on Android to spike temporarily. (When the Brazil ban lifted, some may have returned to X, the data also suggests.)

Since Bluesky opened its doors to the public in February after a more extended invite-only period, the growth has been remarkable. Bluesky has added more than double since September, when the network had over 9 million users. Following the U.S. presidential election, the app started to gain about 100,000 users daily. However, that pace soon increased when on November 12, the company stated that they had added a million users over the last week. By then, on November 13, Bluesky hit its last big milestone of 15 million users.

While Elon Musk's usage of X to campaign for President-elect Donald Trump certainly fuels some of those departures, other newcomers to Bluesky might have had it in mind to leave X over changes such as how the blocking feature works or a new policy that has opened up the selling of user data to train AI companies.