Bluesky saw a massive surge in users in 2024. The social media platform has become one of the primary destinations for those leaving X (formerly Twitter). This year, 22.9 million people signed up for Bluesky. Over half of those new users (over 13 million) joined the platform in just the last month and a half.
Those figures come courtesy of Bluesky's 2024 in Review piece, which went up just before the end of the year. In that blog post, Bluesky highlighted other milestones, such as the platform transitioning from invite-only to being open to the public. "At launch, Bluesky had an early community of 3M people. One week later, over a million new users had signed up," said Bluesky.
2024 also saw Bluesky meet its goal to implement federation, which makes an interconnected social network possible. As a result, people can run personal data servers rather than relying on Bluesky's infrastructure.
This time one year ago, Bluesky provided a bare-bones experience. This year the platform added support for hashtags, direct messages, video sharing, and trending topics. Those are all standard features on major social media platforms, so rolling them out was important to make Bluesky a viable alternative to sites like X.
Bluesky also shipped support for starter packs in 2024. That feature, which is surprisingly unique, allows people to create a list of accounts to follow. For example, we have a Windows Central starter pack that includes all our members of staff that are on the platform.
With many leaving X or looking for a social media platform that's less toxic than X, Instagram, and Facebook, Bluesky gained millions of users. There are even a pair of third-party Bluesky apps on Windows 11 (Beeskie and DarkSky), as well as deck.blue site that has a similar interface to TweetDeck.
Below are all the new features from 2024 highlighted by Bluesky.
Bluesky 2024 updates: Big Features
- Hashtags: We added hashtags to make finding content easier.
- Direct Messages: In May, we launched DMs, creating new avenues for connection.
- Starter packs: In June, we launched starter packs, helping communities onboard to Bluesky more easily.
- Video Sharing: In September, we launched videos.
- Trending topics: In December, right around Christmas, we launched trending topics.
Bluesky 2024 updates: Small Features
- Account deactivation (June),
- Priority notifications (July),
- Self-moderation tools like detach quotes and hide reply (August),
- Pinned posts (October), and
- The thread composer (November).
