Bluesky Is Losing Users. Here's What It's Doing Instead.
Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million people using it each month as of June 2026, down 27.2% from a year earlier, according to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch. The number of people opening the app daily fell 25.6% year-over-year in July 2026 to roughly 3 million. This is not a sudden drop. The app averaged about 22.1 million monthly users in the last quarter of 2024, falling to 10.7 million by the second quarter of 2026. That is a decline of about 52% over eighteen months.
The pattern will be familiar to anyone who followed Bluesky's surge after the 2024 U.S. election. In November 2024, the platform passed 20 million users as large numbers of people left X (formerly Twitter), driving daily usage up about 500% in the U.S. Even during that surge, more than 115,000 users deactivated their accounts, per NPR. By December 2024, Bluesky's safety account reported that over 12 million people had joined in the past month and daily active users had grown tenfold (Bluesky Safety). By January 2025, growth was already slowing, with user protests over moderation policies and bot issues (TechCrunch). By November 2025, daily active users were down nearly 40% year-over-year, per Forbes.
One way to measure an app's health is its stickiness rate: the share of monthly users who open it every day. Bluesky's was about 29% in June 2026, roughly the same as Threads (TechCrunch). This matters because it shows how many people make the app a habit, not just how many signed up. Matching Threads suggests that Bluesky's problem is keeping people engaged, not attracting them in the first place.
For comparison, Threads reported more than 275 million monthly active users as of November 2024, far more than Bluesky's (TechCrunch). X had around 302 million mobile monthly active users as of June 2026, with daily mobile users down 7% year-over-year in July 2026 to 123.7 million. X's website visits were up 5.3% year-over-year in July 2026 to 4.7 billion (TechCrunch). So both X and Bluesky are losing daily mobile users, though at very different scales and rates.
Toni Schneider, who became Bluesky's permanent CEO in July 2026, is leading a shift in strategy that looks beyond the app itself. Bluesky is focusing on the AT Protocol, the underlying technology that runs the Bluesky app and a growing number of other social apps, including BlackSky and Eurosky. Think of it this way: Bluesky is trying to become less like a single social network and more like the set of rules that many different social networks can share. The company launched Attie, an AI-powered research tool, in July 2026, and is working on adding support for private data to the platform (TechCrunch). In May 2026, Bluesky also added long-form content to compete with X Articles, letting users read articles and blog posts, not just short posts (TechCrunch.
This focus on the underlying technology showed up in earlier decisions. Bluesky's 2024 Protocol Roadmap noted that feed services had no feedback on how users interacted with them, and announced a new way for apps to send user behavior data to those feed services (Bluesky Docs). The company's first transparency report, issued in January 2026, recorded a rise in user reports and legal demands, though reports per 1,000 monthly active users declined 50.9% from January to December (TechCrunch.
The broader question is whether the AT Protocol can succeed as the foundation other apps are built on, even if the Bluesky app itself stops growing or keeps shrinking. A useful comparison is the early web, where individual browsers and websites came and went, but the shared rules underneath, like HTTP, lasted. The difference is that those web rules never depended on a single popular app to prove they worked. The AT Protocol's collection of third-party apps is still small, and shared technology standards have historically needed either one must-have app or steady institutional support to reach the point where adoption feeds on itself.
In this author's view, Bluesky's leadership appears to be making a deliberate trade: accepting that the app loses users while spending that time and energy building credibility for the protocol underneath. Whether that trade pays off depends on whether enough developers build on the AT Protocol to create a network that does not depend on any one app's user numbers. The early signs, including the growing number of AT Protocol apps and the launch of tools like Attie, are encouraging but not yet conclusive.
The competitive landscape adds pressure. X is losing mobile users slowly but gaining web traffic. Threads has a much larger user base. Mastodon, another social platform built on shared rules rather than one company's control, occupies a similar space without Bluesky's focus on selling the underlying technology as its main product. Bluesky is betting that the infrastructure layer is where lasting value is built, even as the app that first brought it attention continues to shrink.
