By SARAH PARVINI

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Social media site Blue sky gained 1 million new users in the week following the US election, with some X users looking for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and interact with others online.

Bluesky said Wednesday that the total number of users had increased to 15 million, up from about 13 million at the end of October.

Defended by former Twitter CEO Jack DorseyBluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. This invite-only period gave the site time to develop moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Elon Musk’s X, with a “discovery” feed as well as a timeline feed for the accounts users follow. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find “starter packs” that provide a curated list of people and personalized feeds to follow.

The post-election surge in users isn’t the first time Bluesky has benefited from X’s departure. Bluesky gained 2.6 million users in the week following X’s launch. banned in Brazil in August — 85% of them come from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in the span of a day last month, when X reported that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.

Despite Bluesky’s growth, X said last week that it had “dominated the global debate over the US election” and set new records. The platform saw a 15.5% increase in new user registrations on Election Day, X said, with a record 942 million posts worldwide. Representatives for Bluesky and X did not respond to requests for comment.

Bluesky has referenced its competitive relationship with X through tongue-in-cheek comments, including an Election Day post about

“I can guarantee that no member of the Bluesky team will sit down with a presidential candidate tonight and give them direct access to control what you see online,” Bluesky said.

On the platform, new users – including journalists, left-wing politicians and celebrities – posted memes and said they looked forward to using a space free of ads and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of the early days of X, when it was still Twitter.

On Wednesday, The Guardian said it would no longer publish on X, citing “far-right conspiracy theories and racism” on the site as the reason.

Last year, advertisers such as IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast fled X over concerns about their ads running alongside pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with Musk stoking tensions with his own posts endorsing a conspiracy theory anti-Semitic.

Originally published: November 13, 2024 at 4:20 p.m. CST