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CNN
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X-competition Bluesky shot this week to the number 1 position in the American hit list of the Apple App Store, because many users of the Elon Musk platform said they were phasing out in the aftermath of his important role in the US presidential elections .

Bluesky’s user base has doubled in the past 90 days — on Tuesday, the company said it had brought in 1 million new signups in the past week alone, bringing its total number of users to more than 15 million.

The energy on X is clearly different: Musk has used the site for months to boost newly elected President Donald Trump. In recent days, researchers on the site have recorded spikes in sexist language, such as “your body, my choice.” And that’s on top of Musk’s previous changes like cutting moderators, reinstating banned accounts, allowing racist and Nazi accounts, and changing the platform’s verification system to boost anyone willing to pay regardless of what they posted – all of which contributed to the tanker. the company’s core activity in advertising.

A number of prominent journalists therefore announced their departure from X this week to join Bluesky, including Charlie Warzel of Atlantic, the Mara Gay from the New York Times and former CNN anchor Don Lemon. British newspaper The Guardian also said on Wednesday that it will no longer post to

But while Bluesky might have that One moment three years after launch, any claim that it will kill X should be taken with a grain of salt.

As a private company, X does not share user numbers. Recent third-party estimates on user trends have been mixed, although the consistent user growth the platform experienced before Musk’s acquisition does appear to have reversed over the past two years. But – for better or probably worse – the site has so far weathered the creation of multiple other competitors, the reinstatement of white supremacists, and the spread of Musk’s racist conspiracy theories without fading into irrelevance.

“X usage is at an all-time high and continues to rise,” Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, said in a post on Wednesday. “To all our users – of every interest, political party and viewpoint – you will always have a place to freely and safely participate in the global conversation.”

More than 115,000 American X users deactivated their accounts the day after the election, the largest single-day exit since Musk took control of the platform, according to digital intelligence platform Similarweb. And that only included users who deactivated through the website, not through the mobile app.

But X also had the highest web traffic all year that the same day, with 46.5 million visits on desktop alone, a 38% increase over the average of the previous few months, according to Similarweb. Bluesky also saw daily visits on Election Day and the day after jump to 1.2 million and 1.3 million, respectively, compared to about 800,000 in the days before.

“Whether there will be a measurable decline in the audience for But, he added, “X’s recent daily spike in U.S. traffic does not offset the audience erosion the service has seen in recent years since Musk took ownership of the service.”

Sensor Tower, another market research firm, found that the number of daily active app users and time spent on November 5 and 6 compared to the previous 30 days. But on November 10, there were X daily active users relatively flat compared to just before the election, while Bluesky saw a 28% jump among users in the same period.

Still, X has many more users than Bluesky, Sensor Tower noted. (Bluesky also remains much smaller than Meta’s Threads.)

A third app data analytics company, Apptopia, also told CNN that activity on It said that X’s daily active users peaked a few days later on November 9 before tapering off slightly. On Bluesky, daily users more than doubled between mid-October and the week after the election.

Here’s the takeaway from all these numbers: At the same time, Bluesky saw a surge after the election that appears to be continuing, although its overall user base is still relatively small.

Of course, many people visit all kinds of media during and around an election week. And it’s worth remembering that we’ve seen countless users swear off X before in the wake of previous Musk incidents, only to see many of them trickle back to the platform.

Nevertheless, some prominent social media users say they are now seeing more engagement on their posts (which users on these sites typically value above all else) on Bluesky, despite having a larger following on X.

Ed Zitron, founder of media relations company EZPR, told CNN that he and others have stayed on X “because there is a critical mass of readers there and there is a virality to the content you post.”

But Zitron said, “With the way Bluesky is scaling right now, I don’t see how (X) remains dominant,” adding that he has 90,000 followers on X but “the actual engagement doesn’t seem to match.”

New York Times journalist Mike Isaac had a similar comment in a Bluesky post on Tuesday: “Really disorienting to go from Twitter — where I post to 200,000 followers and get five favorites — to Bluesky, where a post immediately gets 200 favorites gets.”

But the thing is, even if X were to attract users to Bluesky, there’s no sign that Musk would care enough to do anything.

Although Musk said when he took over the platform that he wanted it to be a “politically neutral” digital town square, X took a sharp right turn under his leadership even before he started defending Trump and his MAGA movement. Musk made In the run-up to the election, Musk spread false and misleading claims about Trump’s rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. The platform also reportedly pushed political and pro-Trump content to users whether they wanted it or not.

Now X has become something of a hub for right-wing social media users.

And by using the platform as a megaphone to promote Trump, Musk may have achieved the kind of return he couldn’t even imagine when he bought Twitter for $44 billion two years ago: direct access to the US president.

Trump announced Tuesday evening that Musk will take on an official role in his administration, becoming one of two people to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk also joined a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky immediately after the election, presumably to discuss the country’s war with Russia, in which Musk’s Starlink has played a key role as a communications tool.

And Musk’s personal wealth also rose by $26.5 billion the day after the election, as investors hope his relationship with Trump will boost his companies’ fortunes.

That’s almost certainly worth a lot more than X’s declining ad revenue and any lost users in Musk’s mind.

– CNN’s Liam Reilly and Matt Egan contributed to this report.