Perhaps no platform has tried to challenge the status of Twitter as much as the nascent social network Bluesky. As per recent data, it has managed to surpass a significant achievement. Specifically, Bluesky has successfully recorded one million installations across iOS and Android, rebounding from its discretionary invite-only model.
Contrasted with the gigantic capacities of Threads, Instagram's Twitter contender and a mainstream entry integrated deeply with the platform's social graph, Bluesky's numbers might seem dwarfed. They definitely lag behind Twitter, which recorded an additional 72 million new downloads while Bluesky was marching towards its maiden million. Setting the numbers side by side: Twitter saw an average of 518,000 new downloads daily, according to the indicators tabulated by data.ai, while Bluesky registered around 8,300.
Despite the decimal fraction, Bluesky has shown considerable momentum when taking into account the exclusivity of its availability. Early July saw a temporary suspension of sign-ups due to a drastic influx caused by Twitter's resolution to limit the visible tweet counts. The Bloosky developers feared that the overwhelming traffic could potentially trigger performance drawbacks, as it wasn't fully equipped to sustain such a large rush of users at that particular juncture.
Interestingly, the stringency exerted by Twitter turned out to be a silver lining for Bluesky. Data shared by data.ai infers that this limitation enabled Bluesky to reach this monumental feat, with nearly 300,000 installations cropping up since the last day of June.
The demographic breakdown indicates the United States presiding over the large majority of Bluesky installations, specifically 40%, led by Brazil at 9.5%, followed by Japan at 8.5%, Thailand at 7.5%, and finally the United Kingdom at 4.6%.
The journey to one million downloads has spanned approximately four months for Bluesky. It's speculated that had the network opened its fences completely, it might have seen faster adoption rates, albeit at the risk of potential performance bottlenecks. As the imminent competitor Threads harbors plans to partner with ActivityPub, the power source behind the open-source, devolved social network, Mastodon - yet another Twitter rival - Bluesky's decision to maintain its invite-only policy is speculated to potentially derail its progressive trajectory. Concurrently, Bluesky has its own roadmap for developing an independent, decentralized social networking code, known as the AT Protocol.
