Bluesky Needs to Burst Its American Bubble

(Bloomberg Opinion) — X, formerly Twitter, continues to find new ways to get worse since being taken over by the world’s richest man. And that was before it started doubling up as a generator of non-consensual AI porn, some of which featured children, earlier this year.

But even all this could not take away its role in global discourse. It’s been a long time since I left the link, but despite efforts to switch to one of its most hyped competitors, Bluesky Social, I still find myself scrolling.

In my opinion, the failure of the platform is that it still has not achieved the X international reach inherited from Twitter. When global news breaks, such as the US and Israel starting a war with Iran, X still hosts the largest real-time audio community. A professor of security and diplomacy recently put it this way: “Nobody likes to hear that the Nazi Bar serves better drinks, but if you want to cover the hard security aspects of war professionally, Bluesky isn’t enough.” And this is not just during the crisis. Even for casually tracking tech trends that have nothing to do with US political melodrama from Bengaluru to Tokyo, the X remains frustratingly useful.

Many argue that Bluesky’s biggest limitation is ideological, that it has become a liberal echo chamber. But the biggest thing holding it back is not that it’s a progressive bubble, it’s that it’s an American bubble.

According to Sensor Tower, nearly half (47%) of Bluesky’s daily active app users come from the US, while only 15% of Xs come from the US. That’s on top of a much smaller base: The market intelligence firm estimates X has 31 million mobile app DAUs in the U.S., while startups have 2 million.

But Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told me it’s a misunderstanding to think of it as just a mobile app. What makes it different is its protocol technology that allows people to form different networks like Blacksky, a social community created by people who were previously active on Black Twitter. Wang says around 6,000 apps have been created in their ecosystem. He said Bluesky has 43 million global users, an impressive achievement for a platform that is just two years old and employs about 40 people. Wang notes that it took Twitter “three to four years” at the time to reach that scale.

And it is slowly but steadily spreading abroad; most often it’s breaking news: when X is banned in Brazil or martial law is declared in South Korea. “Growth on social platforms is rarely linear and rarely happens in isolation,” says Wang. The trillion-dollar question is how to turn these refugees into regulars.

Despite Bluesky’s growing pains, there are reasons to support him. It is often considered a one-to-one substitute for X, but this is a false equivalence. Its goal is decentralization: allowing users to build their own networks and have more control over their broadcasts. This is the exact opposite of the algorithmically powered conversation offered in X or the ad-driven engagement machine that powers platforms like Facebook. It was designed to support connections and the open web, rather than trapping users within a walled garden.

There are obvious ways to expand Bluesky’s geographic reach. Translation on the platform is low-hanging fruit. As my colleague Gearoid Reidy wrote, this helped Americans and Japanese X users bond over a shared love of barbecue, making a chaotic world feel a lot smaller. Its rival can do the same by reducing language barriers. AI-powered translation is already much better than it was a few years ago.

Another priority is to acquire news influencers who share more. Even at its best, Twitter could never match other social networks in terms of active users. Its great influence was due to the concentration of journalists, politicians and other agenda-setters debating it in public. Many of these “news influencers” still post more regularly on X, according to Pew data. Bluesky needs to make a stronger case that its decentralized architecture is better at driving traffic to Substacks, blogs, and publisher sites than X, where the algorithm drops external links.

It doesn’t help if several Twitter successors emerge at the same time. There’s President Donald Trump’s mouthpiece Truth Social (don’t get me started) and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Threads (an internet culture reporter who boasts 17 hours of screen time a day called it her least favorite social network). Threads’ international growth in daily active users is outpacing Bluesky’s. But it’s unclear how many of these opens reflect actual habit or are driven by clickbait posts that populate sister app Instagram.

Users are now more fragmented than ever, and overcoming the network effects Elon Musk has bought into will never be easy. That’s probably why he paid $44 billion in the first place, to secure legacy advantage and promote his own missions.

Still, social media is going through a broader reckoning. The interaction algorithms that shape online life are accused of dividing people, radicalizing us, making us lonelier, and even enabling persecution. Regulators are increasingly frustrated that so much power is in the hands of so few.

User experience has also deteriorated. Facebook essentially thinks it’s useful for selling an undesirable aspect of artificial intelligence as well as an old dresser. Instagram and TikTok may be fun, but they’re not the most reliable ecosystems for keeping your finger on the pulse of current events. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst outcome if most of us logged off and touched the grass.

Or maybe, as Wang hopes, the internet can be transformed into something better, a place where people control algorithms rather than being controlled by them.

The era of being able to move fast and break anything is coming to an end. The next social media winner will have to prove that scale and sustainability can coexist. The old model caught our attention. The next one will have to win this one.