The BlueSky logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen with its icon in back of it.
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Bluesky, the social media platform that originated within Twitter, rose to prominence as a rival to the network after Elon Musk acquired the company and rebranded it as X.
But, two years since its launch, the site has around just 10% of X’s estimated global users. Bluesky’s Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told CNBC that the site saw its future not in rivalling X, but in taking inspiration from the online community forum Reddit.
“The world is changing rapidly, and we’re not trying to build what social used to be and get to parity,” Wang told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday.
Wang said that Bluesky would move away from the “public square” style of feed of X or Threads, and will instead be “useful” as a discovery mechanism.
“What we’ve learned through this process is that I think the public square is not the direction we want to go in. Essentially, I think it’s useful as a discovery mechanism, but we’re very inspired by companies like Reddit.” she said.
“A public square, where there’s only a stage, and there’s posters, like people on a stage and people who are watching, that is not social… we’re in the medieval stages of the online world.”
Reddit launched in 2011 and billed itself as “the front page of the internet,” offering “sub-Reddits” on a huge range of topics. It went public in 2024 and trades at around $170 a share.
Bluesky is built on an open-source AT Protocol, allowing developers to build apps, services, and communities with greater control over their content. Bluesky was initially founded within Twitter in 2019 and backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, but it spun off in 2021. After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, the companies ended their service agreement.
It raised $100 million in Series B funding in April 2025, but at the end of October last year, it had reportedly seen a 40% drop in daily mobile active users over the preceding 12 months.
According to a former engineering lead at Bluesky who posts user statistics on the platform, Bluesky declined from a peak of 1.4 million active daily posters in late 2024 to around 600,000 today.
It had 43 million global users as of March, compared to an estimated 450 million X users worldwide. Threads, the Instagram-linked platform Meta launched in 2023, surpassed 400 million active monthly users last year, per its executives.
Wang said the decline “generally follows the retention curve of a lot of social companies, where there’s like big outside events, and then there’s a leveling out, but that leveling out is much higher than the previous bump, and so it’s not all downhill.”
Bluesky needs to “modernize and also get to parity on video features,” specifically upload speeds and the length of videos that can be published, she told CNBC.
“That’s one area that we haven’t done well in, but I do think that this is an opportunity. Our biggest challenge is our biggest opportunity,” Wang said.
She added that Bluesky had not definitively ruled out ads, but said other companies treated the advertising business model “as if they had discovered oil.”
