Communities on alternative social media platforms like the fediverse and Bluesky tend to create narratives about how their networks grow. For both networks the narrative is fairly similar: Big Tech platforms and their leaders behave badly, which in turn causes users to search for more ethical alternatives. This narrative is visible in the fediverse’s understanding of the 2022 Twitter Migration and Bluesky’s explosive growth in 2024. But what happens when these migration waves disappear, even though the conditions for them do not? Musk’s continuous egregious actions have not led to new growth for the fediverse and Bluesky, indicating that our narratives of growth need updating. Meanwhile, the continuous growth of Threads shows that cultural impact might just matter more than user counts.
Where we think growth comes from
Late 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon and the fediverse experienced the Twitter Migration, where a massive group of people moved away from Twitter to Mastodon, in search for a different microblogging platform that is not owned by a tech billionaire. During 2023 this process continued, with various actions and statements by Musk resulting in people moving away from Twitter in waves to Mastodon.
This time period shaped the way the fediverse understands itself. Open social platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube have been around for quite a while before this time period, and the platforms and its users have always understood that they function in opposition to Big Tech platforms. Building a network that is owned by the community, not a Big Tech company, has always been an integral part of why platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube were created. The inflow of new people during 2022 and 2023 affirmed that vision, and expanded on it: the fediverse could exist as an alternative network to the Big Tech social networks, and it could grow by people getting fed up with platforms like Twitter and Facebook and moving to platforms like Mastodon. In summer 2023 Reddit made changes to their API, which led to a number of popular third-party Reddit clients shutting down. Again, people looked for alternative platforms, and found one in Lemmy, which multiplied in size.
The mindset became one of “we can present ourself as an ethical alternative, and over time people will join the fediverse and the network will grow”. This worked, until it didn’t.
Bluesky’s moments came in the second half of 2024. The network opened up access in early 2024, but growth had been fairly slow in the first half of the year. In the second half of the year this changed when Brazil banned the use of X in the country over a dispute with Musk, leading to a massive surge in new users for the platform. The election in the US and the presidency of Trump, tied closely to Musk’s involvement led to another three spikes in signups for Bluesky. The start of the Trump presidency in January 2025 was the latest of the spikes for Bluesky’s user growth. The impact was not only on the user numbers for Bluesky, but also on how the world sees Bluesky. The promotion and enthusiasm about Bluesky by MSNBC’s news anchor Rachel Maddow is a good example of this: it solidified Bluesky’s perception in wider mainstream culture as a safer network than X, and also as a network that is predominantly on the left of the political spectrum.
After the spike in growth in January 2025 things changed again. The perception on Bluesky was still that every time Elon Musk did something especially outrageous, evil or stupid, this would lead to people leave X and join Bluesky. This did not pan out: Musk managed to put himself up high on the list of people whose actions directly led for the largest number of deaths in the twenty-first century due to his involvement in the shutdown of USAID, but such evil did not meaningfully lead to people leaving Musk’s social network for other places. This was far from the only action that Musk took that led to outrage and moral objections by people who use X, without a corresponding move by the people condemning Musk towards other platforms.
The story these communities on these alternative platforms tell themselves about growth emerged from specific set of circumstances that proved temporary rather than permanent. The narrative that ethical alternatives can attract users wanting to move away from controversial platforms worked during specific time periods. These are windows of time, which seem to close again within a year or so. After this window has closed, the perception that this is where growth comes from remains however.
Evolving competitors
In the years since Musk bought Twitter, the platform has changed and evolved as well. The name change to X is not just symbolic, but an indication that it is a different platform with a different purpose. Another indication is that xAI, Musk’s AI company that also builds X’s AI chatbot Grok, recently bought X. If you understand the X platform through the lens of corporate structure, it becomes clearer that the future of the app is in being a distribution platform for Grok. In that context, it matters even more that Grok used to surprisingly politically neutral (mostly), to the annoyance of Musk. Musk critiqued Grok for being too woke, promised he’d make changes and now Grok functions to further spread the message of fascism. That these changes have not lead to any corresponding reaction by X users to start using other platforms out of protest is a clear indication that the dynamic out of which the fediverse and Bluesky have grown in the past year is truly over. People who continue using a platform where the owner openly manipulates core functions to favour fascist messaging should not be assumed to have any further ‘red line’ that would finally drive them to leave.
Meanwhile, Threads continues to grow at a steady pace. Data from Similarweb show that Threads is now almost as big as X is worldwide, with 115M Daily Active Users (DAU) for Threads and 132M DAU for X. Bluesky is much smaller at an estimated 4.1M DAU. Mastodon does not publish DAU, but it is roughly an order of magnitude smaller still than Bluesky. What’s notable about Threads’ growth is how steady it is, the graph by Similarweb shows effectively a straight line for Threads’ user statistics. This is in stark contrast with the user graphs for Bluesky over the same time period, which shows large spikes in growth, followed by a drop in users, until another spike takes the user numbers even higher.
These different growth patterns also show up in media stories. Threads has surprisingly few stories about growth of the network. The only story about real-world events leading to growth for Threads I can find is when Threads suddenly got popular in Taiwan as it was used for promotion during the presidential election of early 2024. In contrast, almost every growth spike for Bluesky and Mastodon over the last few years can be pointed to with news stories about what caused people to look for new platforms.
Cultural impact
Talking about network growth in terms of active users and account registration gives a good pretence of objectivity, and a sense that this represents the “true” growth of a network. However, the reason why people care so much about Twitter and finding a good replacement is not because of total user numbers: Twitter was always the smallest of the Big Tech platforms after all. Twitter and X matter because of its unparalleled ability to generate culture and shape politics. Twitter and X are the places where elite consensus is formed. It is the dominant platform for shaping our collective understanding of the world. That’s why control over X’s algorithm (and chatbot) is so valuable: it is not about telling individuals what is correct, but it is about influencing what people think about what other people think.
Measuring the cultural output and political impact of a social network is a fool’s errand, as it is both incredibly unclear what exactly it is you are measuring, how to measure such a thing as “culture”, and if such a thing can be measured in the first place anyway. As such, I’m not going to pretend that the following is anything more than a personal vibe. Regardless, I find that Bluesky has a high amount of cultural relevancy, and Threads with a surprisingly low amount of cultural impact, with X still at the top. Internet culture newsletters like Garbage Day also seem to feature predominantly cultural events that involve X, and to a lesser extend Bluesky, with little attention to Threads. Somewhat related, large media organisations such as Wired and Washington Post also report that Bluesky is one of the biggest drivers of traffic and news subscribers. That Bluesky is even in the same league as platforms that have 25 times the number of active users is an indication how the new social networks can be culturally and politically impactful without having the largest number of users.
The stories that networks like the fediverse and Bluesky tell themselves about growth matter. It impacts decisions and future expectations. Even after the inflows of new users to Mastodon from X looking for an ethical alternative have stopped for a while, future expectations in the community still often seem to be based on the same pattern. But how growth has happened for both the fediverse and Bluesky seems to be tied to specific moments in time. The circumstances that lead to such behaviour can disappear all of a sudden again. That’s not to say that growth is over for either network. It just might come from different places, and for others reasons that people might not expect.