Bluesky Engagement Slips

Few social media platforms have achieved the meteoric rise in popularity experienced by Bluesky. The microblogging social media site, viewed as a progressive alternative to X/Twitter, has seen significant growth since its launch in early 2023 and currently claims about 36.5 million registered users.

The platform, lauded for its open and decentralized structure—which gives users more control and autonomy—doesn’t run ads. It also isn’t bogged down by the AI slop and spam that litters most competing social platforms.

Bluesky’s birth occurred several months after Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022, a move that caused many users to flee that platform in search of left-leaning alternatives. But it was the November 2024 U.S. presidential election that truly ushered the site into a new era. Following the election, Bluesky witnessed user growth of about 13 million in six weeks, crossing the 20-million user mark by mid-November. By the end of January 2025, that number had grown to 30 million.

In addition to being a haven for left-leaning users, the site also skews young: According to data by Statista, more than half (56 percent) of the site’s global users are between the ages of 18 and 34—and 30 percent of those users are between 18 and 24—an ideal demo for any burgeoning social media platform.

But engagement and activity on the site appear to have dropped off significantly in recent months. According to Jaz's Bluesky index, which provides aggregate statistics regarding Bluesky activity and engagement, posting and interaction on the site today might be described as irregular. A few examples: There were 998,390 unique likes on the site on June 10, compared to a peak of 2,789,693 single-day likes on November 18, 2024. There were 500,098 posts on June 10, compared to a peak of 1,479,838 posts on November 19. There were 282,054 unique followers on June 10, compared to a peak of 3,124,644 followers on November 18.

One going theory for the recent stall in growth could be the fact that X remains the bigger platform. There are still currently around 600 million monthly users on X, and many of the popular journalists, politicians, activists and public figures that use the site have yet to convene on a competing platform despite X’s bad reputation and Musk’s litany of brand-poisoning gaffes. A recent Pew Research Center analysis found that many “news influencers”—or social media users with large followings who share news and current events—have indeed migrated to Bluesky and increased their activity on that site during the first three months of 2025. However, the Pew report found that most of those influencers still haven’t left X, including three-quarters of left-leaning news influencers and 87 percent of right-leaning news influencers. Worse, they still seem to be more active on X than they are on Bluesky.

Another reason could be due to the political homogeneity of Bluesky’s user base. Since the site’s rise in popularity in late 2024, one salient criticism of the platform has been that it perpetuates an ideological echo chamber populated by users who exhibit a general lack of willingness to engage in discussions expressing viewpoints with which they disagree. “Blocking” users with differing viewpoints is a common practice. The subsequent drop-off of activity and engagement on Bluesky presents an interesting paradox: in a digital ecosystem where divisiveness is a guaranteed recipe for clicks, engagement may be bound to dwindle on platforms where most of its users share the same views.

A recent study, “Politics and Polarization on Bluesky,” sought to analyze the state of political discourse and polarization on the site. Conducted by researchers at the University of Zurich and Finland’s Aalto University, the study analyzed activity on the platform that took place between December 2024 and May 2025. It found that while non-political conversations on the platform remain diverse and political discussions often “echo familiar narratives and polarization trends,” those discussions are typically dominated by a politically homogeneous user base, with the most polarized topics also being “highly imbalanced in the numbers of users on opposing sides, with the smaller group consisting of only 1–2% of the users.”

“One possible interpretation of our findings is that we are witnessing not just polarization within individual platforms, but the culmination of a broader, ecosystem-wide polarization across the digital landscape,” the study’s authors wrote. “Rather than encountering deeply divided groups on a single platform, we may be seeing the emergence of distinct online spaces, such as Truth Social or, increasingly, Twitter/X after recent trends in demographic shifts, where users largely agree on political issues. In this scenario, digital platforms themselves are becoming more politically homogeneous, each catering to relatively like-minded communities. As a result, the clash of conflicting views is diminishing, not because the surrounding polarization has decreased, but because individuals with differing political attitudes are increasingly segregated into separate, self-reinforcing digital environments.”