It’s not just Elon Musk critics flocking to X rival Bluesky

Alessandro Biascioli/Alamy via Reuters

• Bluesky has reached 20m users
• Offers more data protections
• Has yet to take off in Middle East

Social media challenger Bluesky hit 20 million users this month, mostly by attracting people who have grown disillusioned with X and its owner Elon Musk.

Bluesky has gained roughly 100,000 users a day since the US presidential election, when Musk was a full-throated supporter of Donald Trump. Its global user base reached 15 million people by November 13 and 20 million on November 20.

The platform formerly known as Twitter still has 10 times as many active users as Bluesky, but the X alternative is also attracting people concerned over data privacy.

Bluesky was developed by Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s co-founders, and its CEO Jay Graber as a decentralised service. It does not hold data in one place – unlike X – and promises to forgo ads and data mining.

All this should add to its appeal in the Middle East, where a survey by Northwestern University in Qatar found that between 20 percent and 40 percent of Gulf nationals had changed their social media use because of privacy worries.

The Northwestern study, published in 2019, also found that about half of internet users in the region worry about companies using their personal information without consent. 

Bluesky has yet to gain a foothold in the Middle East, however, and features such as Arabic-language support are not available at present.

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In addition, it can be tricky to moderate content and manage misinformation on a decentralised platform, especially one with a small team. Bluesky has fewer than 50 employees, according to its LinkedIn page.

Briar Prestidge, founder of Dubai marketing agency Prestidge Group, says she has not observed significant adoption of Bluesky in the Gulf, but believes the platform has potential.

It has not provided sufficient incentives for many businesses to take note or to differentiate itself from X, she says. “Our clients continue to prioritise X as part of an integrated digital strategy that includes LinkedIn and other established platforms.”

One Lebanese user of Bluesky, journalist Luther Kanso, says he is still checking X, but the “only reason” is that it “remains widely used among my circle of friends and trusted people, so it helps me keep track of things and news, especially when it comes to updates concerning our current conditions”.

As for Bluesky, Kanso says: “I’m slowly getting there. I’m just treading lightly and studying its dynamics – also waiting for more people to populate it.”