https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/technology/bluesky-growing-pains.html

Technology|How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling
Explosive Growth
  
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bluesky-growing-pains.html

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A portrait of Jay Graber, wearing a black top, looking over her
shoulder to the camera.
Jay Graber, Bluesky's chief executive, said there had been some
"growing pains" as new users flooded the site. Credit...via Bluesky
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How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive
Growth

The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since
the election. It hasn't all been easy.

Jay Graber, Bluesky's chief executive, said there had been some
"growing pains" as new users flooded the site. Credit...via Bluesky

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Mike Isaac

By Mike Isaac

Mike Isaac has used Bluesky since shortly after it launched last
year.

  * Nov. 17, 2024Updated 2:18 p.m. ET

In February 2023, a half-dozen techies introduced a social network
prototype in an invitation-only launch. They deliberately debuted
their creation, Bluesky, with little fanfare so that they could
closely manage its growth.

But lately, it has been anything but slow and steady.

Over the past week, Bluesky's growth has exploded, more than doubling
to 15 million-plus users as people seek alternatives to X, Facebook
and Threads. It has rocketed to the top of Apple's and Google's app
stores as the most downloaded free app. Its ascent has been so rapid
that the company has been forced to grow up practically overnight.

Bluesky's 20 full-time employees have been working around the clock
to deal with the issues that come with hyper-growth: site outages,
glitches in the code and content moderation issues. Most importantly,
they have been trying to keep early users happy as new members have
flooded in.

"We as a team take pride in our ability to scale quickly," Jay
Graber, 33, the chief executive of Bluesky, said in an interview.
"But there's always some growing pains." She added that the app --
which is still dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram and X -- was adding more
than one million new users a day.

Bluesky is surging amid upheaval in the social media world. After
Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he morphed it into X, changing many
of its functions and alienating some of its most loyal users.
Threads, an app similar to X that Meta introduced last year, relies
mostly on an opaque algorithmic curation that reduces politics from
people's feeds. That has caused some people to head to other
networks, including Bluesky, to discuss hot-button social issues.

ImageThe Bluesky app is shown on a phone and on a computer monitor.
The Bluesky app is designed to let users have more control over the
kind of social media posts they see.Credit...Mario Tama/Getty Images

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