Bluesky Signups Surge In UK After Musk Clash With British Government

Social media platform Bluesky is touting a large increase in UK signups, after the owner of X (former Twitter) Elon Musk recently clashed with the British government.

Bluesky told Reuters on Monday in an emailed statement that it has seen a surge in signups in the United Kingdom in recent days – a sign that Elon Musk’s controversial comments on the nationwide riots were prompting people to look for alternatives to X.

An increasingly right wing Elon Musk had made a series of controversial (and some allege incendiary) interventions in the recent riots in the UK triggered by online misinformation around the murder of three girls, which saw many accusing Musk of exacerbating tensions.

Musk clash

Indeed, Elon Musk spent days embroiled in a war of words with the British government and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, over his posts on the riots and protests in the UK.

Musk had tweeted that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK and that the police response had been “one-sided”. He even compared the UK to the Soviet Union.

The prime minister’s spokesperson had said that there was “no justification” for those comments.

The British government called on Elon Musk to act responsibly over his tweets, amid calls to roll out laws policing online content sooner.

During his clash with the UK government, Musk repeatedly targeted Starmer on his platform, branding him “two-tier Keir”.

Musk later shared a fake news post from a far right organisation, about deporting rioters to the Falkland Islands, before he hurriedly deleted it without apologising – an action Musk has done previously when caught out promoting conspiracy theories.

Bluesky signups

Now Bluesky has reportedly said it has seen a 60 percent jump in general activity from accounts in the UK, with several Members of Parliament also joining the platform recently.

“For 5 out of the last 7 days, the UK had the most Bluesky signups of any country,” Bluesky was reportedly to have said.

However Bluesky is starting with a tiny amount of users compared to X – although the firm states on its website that as of May 2024, it has over 6 million users.

However data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb, revealed that in July Bluesky’s monthly active user base stood at about 688,568, a fraction of X’s base of 76.9 million.

In an effort to grow its users, Bluesky in June had begun offering starter packs, which are personalised invites that allow a user to bring their friends “directly into their slice of Bluesky.”

Essentially the starter packs are for users to create a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow, when people join Bluesky.

Growth challenges

Bluesky has some way to go before it build a community anywhere near as large as found on Musk’s X.

In July 2023 Bluesky achieved one million downloads, despite it being in a private beta release.

But in February 2024 Bluesky opened the app to public downloads, and is now said to have approximately 5.9 million users.

But in May 2024 it suffered a blow when Jack Dorsey departed the Bluesky platform he helped create, and in a surprising u-turn endorsed Elon Musk’s X, despite previously stating that Musk was not the right person to lead the platform.

Bluesky had been formally incorporated in late 2021 as a public benefit LLC, with Dorsey on its board of directors.

Bluesky is based on the open source Authenticated Transfer (AT) protocol, which is similar to ActivityPub, the decentralised protocol that powers Mastodon.