I used to like X, and I wasn’t alone. The platform was not only part of my daily routine, a reliable source of entertainment, and a destination to debate without fear of someone retaliating with an insult about your appearance, but also just quite a fun place to be. It still has its moments, like recently when Gary Barlow sharing a family photo somehow spawned thousands of memes about the height of his son. But now, it’s increasingly common to come away from the app feeling generally down about the state of the world and some of the people in it. Based on recent activity, which has seen an increasing number of people and organisations deactivate their X accounts for a variety of reasons, I’m not alone in thinking that either. Why is an Xodus happening now? While lots of people have only recently decided to quit X, this can be traced back to October 2022, when SpaceX founder and Tesla chief Elon Musk completed his US$44 billion acquisition of what was then known as Twitter. The tech billionaire was already a polarising figure but one thing everyone can agree upon is that the world’s richest man has only become more influential since gaining control of a social media platform that millions of people had come to rely on for breaking news and accurate information. As well as changing the app’s beloved name, Musk’s ownership has coincided with a rise of unperturbed hate speech, promotion of right-wing views, and spread of misinformation on the platform. Whatever your political persuasion, though, it would be difficult to argue that the user experience on X today is better than before Musk took control, when one of his first moves was to fire heaps of staff, resulting in severe lapses in content moderation. Other sources of frustration have been the prevalence of bots and a controversial overhaul of the blue tick verification system. More recently, there have been complaints about changes to the platform’s terms of service, which now allow the app to gather user data to train its AI chatbot Grok. The decision to enable accounts to view posts from users that they have been blocked by has also compounded existing safety-related concerns some people had about X. For many, though, the US election was the final straw. Musk was an avid supporter of Donald Trump and his platform became an unofficial mouthpiece for the president-elect’s campaign, which the 53-year-old also helped fund. He has seemingly been rewarded with a role in Trump’s administration, heading up a newly created department of government efficiency. However, it has come at a cost. According to digital intelligence platform Similarweb, the day after the election, X endured its largest user exodus since Musk’s acquisition, as 115,000 so-called ‘Xiters’ decided they had seen enough. In short, since gaining control of X, Musk has merely succeeded in eroding much of the brand loyalty and affinity Twitter had cultivated since launching in 2006. Where are they going? Several companies saw the unrest caused by Musk’s takeover as an opportunity to lure users from X with new text-based platforms that recreated the best elements of the Twitter experience. Alongside Mastodon, the most high-profile of those was Meta’s Threads, which amassed 100 million users in its first week after launching last July. That said, it’s difficult to decipher how many of those joined as part of a migration from X, as Threads is integrated within Instagram, making it easy for existing members of the photo and video-sharing platform to create an account on its sister platform. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the recent ‘Xodus’, though, has been Bluesky, which this week celebrated reaching 20 million users and is now seeing one million sign-ups each day. The platform has enjoyed surges in the past, including an influx of users in Brazil after X was banned in the country in September, but seldom to this extent. While Threads claims to now have more than 200 million users, including 15 million who joined in November alone, the Financial Times estimates that Bluesky has now surpassed the Meta platform for daily active users in the US – which is perhaps a better measure of which app is forcing its way into people’s routines. Some X users have become disillusioned with the platform because of its owner Elon Musk’s close relationship with incoming US president Donald Trump (Image credit: Getty Images) What is Bluesky? Formed in 2019, Bluesky was originally set up as an internal project by Twitter co-founder and then-chief executive Jack Dorsey, who envisioned the platform becoming a decentralised counterpart to the main app. It became an independent business in 2021 and was originally invite-only, enabling the company to build out the platform’s infrastructure and refine the user experience before opening it up to the public in February this year. Today, Dorsey is no longer part of Bluesky, which is owned by Jay Graber, who sits on the board alongside Jabber creator Jeremie Miller, Techdirt founder Mike Masnick and Blockchain Capital general partner Kinjal Shah. The influence of Twitter is easy enough to see, from the colour palette of its butterfly logo down to the layout of the platform, which has an almost identical feed and allows users to like, reshare and reply to posts – known here as ‘skeets’. In many ways, Bluesky looks a lot more like the “old Twitter” than the new one does, which is probably the point. However, there are some key differences that it hopes will attract users from X, including the ability to choose the algorithm that determines what appears on the timeline. There are more than 50,000 custom feeds dedicated to posts from mutual followers and subjects like science, art and even dog pictures, meaning users are more likely to see content relevant to them, which will appeal to those increasingly suspicious of algorithmic manipulation on X. In addition, the fact it is decentralised means users can host their data on servers other than those owned by the company, which could be attractive in the context of the aforementioned recent changes to X’s terms of service. Bluesky now has over 20M people!! 🎉 We've been adding over a million users per day for the last few days. To celebrate, here are 20 fun facts about Bluesky: