“The majority of new users in this influx are from the United States, followed by Canada and Great Britain,” a Bluesky representative told NBC News in an email. “We are happy to welcome all these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers and city planners.”

A spokesperson for

David Carr, the editor of news insights and research at SimilarWeb, provided NBC News with data confirming that X received the most traffic all year during the presidential election. But the next day, November 6, X also saw 115,414 account deactivations, the highest number since Musk took ownership of the site, the study found.

Noëlle Polo, a 22-year-old Texan, joined Bluesky the night after the election. When she woke up the morning after joining Bluesky, she said, “All the Swifties are there.” Polo is one of thousands of people who have fan accounts about Taylor Swift, making up one of the largest fandoms. On November 6, a notable exodus of the Swifties from X landed on Bluesky, which Polo prefers to Threads because it isn’t connected to her Instagram account.

“I have a private personal account for friends and family and a public account for Taylor Swift, so no one is drowning in my Taylor Swift content,” Polo said. “Since the acquisition of Elon, Swifties have been looking for another app besides Twitter. It just wasn’t a healthy environment.”

Rory Mir, deputy director of community organizing at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that “X really teaches everyone the importance of who owns the sites we use and rely on to communicate online.”

“What people see with X is that its value has subjectively deteriorated,” Mir continued. “People don’t feel like the right boxes are being heard or promoted on the site. In many cases they do not feel safe on the site.”

For other X users who used the platform to build an audience and find a community, the decision to stop posting or delete their account is not an easy one.

“From a human perspective, it’s hard to leave behind a technology that was so beneficial to my growth,” says José Vilson, teacher and best-selling author who currently posts on X, Threads, and Bluesky. “I’m probably going to post less, but I’m not going to delete the account unless it’s like, if you don’t do this you’re going to be in big trouble.”

Laura Sell, a marketing and social media manager for Duke University Press, said the nonprofit brand is working to build a following on Bluesky and Threads while still being active and posting on X, where it has more than 50,000 followers. Sell ​​said that while the publisher’s Bluesky and Threads accounts both saw an increase in followers this week, with more on Bluesky, they have not yet reached the size of the X following.

“It’s just so hard to leave that behind,” she said. “I think we would have a conversation if something really egregious happened, we would probably hear from our authors.”

For people who leave the platform, it is not clear what to do with their accounts.

On Friday, Currently, X users can go to the site’s settings and log out.

Everyone who uses the site agrees that their content can be used for “training our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, both generative and other types,” according to the new agreement.

That change may prompt some to want to delete all their posts, or possibly delete their accounts entirely.

While several free services exist to automatically delete all messages from an account, the services reviewed by NBC News do not guarantee against adverse effects such as possible account suspension or require technical work. Some companies, such as TweetDelete and Circleboom, offer automatic tweet deletion services for paid subscribers.

Micah Lee, a privacy advocate and developer and former director of information security at The Intercept, told NBC News that he is developing a new free service to delete messages from multiple platforms, including X, called Cyd, but that it will not be released to the public until next week.

“If you delete your account, someone else can use your account and buy a blue check and possibly pretend to be you,” Mir said. “So that could be a reason, especially if you’re a public, somewhat public figure, to hold on to that namespace and just stop using the site.”

Dr. Jorge Caballero, a data scientist and public health communicator, said he has periodically reactivated his X account for that reason since leaving the platform in 2022. But shortly after the election, he said he had deactivated his account for good.

“There is no point in keeping that username at this point,” Caballero said. He now uses Bluesky full time. “There are enough journalists, community leaders, advocates and science communicators needed to actually effect change and inform the public. So far it’s been true.”