Bluesky experienced rapid user growth in late 2024. The platform's user base expanded from 14.5 million in October to 25 million by December, showcasing its increasing popularity among social media users seeking new options. Surge in downloads and user engagement The platform's growth was particularly notable following the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024, when monthly downloads surged to 7.35 million. This increase in user adoption coincided with rising demand for Twitter alternatives. Earlier in the year, Bluesky had already shown strong performance, with 38,000 downloads from Android devices and 30,000 from iOS devices in July 2024. Moderation challenges and user demographics As Bluesky's user base expanded, so did the need for content moderation. In 2024, the platform received 6.48 million reports to its moderation service, a significant increase from 358,000 reports in 2023. These reports included 1.75 million for anti-social behavior, 1.2 million for misleading content, and 1.4 million for spam.

As of April 2025, 26.42 percent of global Bluesky.com visitors were aged between 25 and 34 years. Additionally, just under one third of users were aged between 18 and 24 years.

Launched in February 2023, Bluesky is a microblogging platform that was proposed as a Twitter alternative at the beginning of the year. In July 2024, the Bluesky app generated 38,000 thousand app downloads from Android devices worldwide, while iOS devices generated 30,000 thousand downloads during the month. Bluesky is a semi-decentralized social media, and while users can access the platform only after being invited by members, all internet users can visualize Bluesky posts and content as of the last examined period.

As of April 2025, ***** percent of visitors to the bsky.app website were male. Additionally, as of the end of 2024, the decentralized social platform had a total of ** million users, up from **** million in October 2024.

Bluesky saw a significant increase in user reports to its moderation service in 2024. The number of reports jumped from 358,000 in 2023 to 6.48 million in 2024, indicating a growing user base and increased platform activity. This surge in moderation reports coincided with a spike in monthly downloads, particularly after the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024, when Bluesky downloads reached 7.35 million. Breakdown of moderation reports The 6.48 million reports submitted to Bluesky's moderation service in 2024 covered various issues. Anti-social behavior accounted for 1.75 million reports, while misleading content and spam received 1.2 million and 1.4 million reports, respectively. These figures suggest that users actively engaged in flagging content that violated platform guidelines. Additionally, Bluesky received 238 requests from law enforcement, governments, and legal entities, responding to 182 of them. The most common legal requests were for user data, followed by takedown requests and inquiries. Comparison with other platforms While Bluesky experienced growth in user reports, other social media platforms like Facebook saw fluctuations in content moderation. In the third quarter of 2024, Facebook removed 6.4 million pieces of hate speech content, down from 7.2 million in the previous quarter. Similarly, Facebook took action on 7.6 million pieces of bullying and harassment related content in the same period, a slight decrease from 7.8 million in the previous quarter. These comparisons highlight the ongoing challenges social media platforms face in content moderation and user safety.

Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data, thus hindering the advancement of computational social science as a whole. We present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social to address this pressing issue. The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totalling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions. Since Bluesky allows users to create and like feed generators (i.e., content recommendation algorithms), we also release the full output of several popular algorithms available on the platform, along with their timestamped “like” interactions. This dataset allows novel analysis of online behavior and human-machine engagement patterns. Notably, it provides ground-truth data for studying the effects of content exposure and self-selection and performing content virality and diffusion analysis.

The microblogging platform Bluesky, which launched in February 2023, has been suggested as a Twitter substitute. As people look for a suitable replacement for the text-based social media platform, demand for Bluesky is rising. After the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024, monthly Bluesky downloads surged to 8.2 million. In March 2025, downloads returned to a steady 1.1 million per month.

Descriptive statistics of promotion and demotion of CCP secretaries in cities with above and below median API in different phases.

As of March 2023, decentralized social media platform Mastodon had over ten million registered users. In November 2022, there were 2.5 million users registered to the online network, an increase of around 300 percent within five months. Additionally, Mastodon, which shares similar micro-blogging features to Twitter, gained roughly 500 thousand users within ten days of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover on October 27th, 2022.

As of February 2025, one quarter of all users of decentralized social media platform Mastodon were aged between 25 and 34 years. One in five users were aged between 18 and 24 years. Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social networks where control and data are distributed across multiple independent servers.