• Bluesky has seen an increase in users following the US elections and now that X is introducing new terms of service.
• The app offers familiar features, making the transition from X smooth.
• Here’s how to get started with Bluesky.

Bluesky is having a busy week as millions of people sign up en masse in the wake of the US elections and the new terms of service coming to X.

The social media platform, which many say they see as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter), started as a research project backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey while he was still CEO in 2019.

It became popular after X owner Elon Musk helped Donald Trump achieve a victory in the presidential election and X introduced new policies on Friday. Bluesky had 17 million users as of Friday, according to a live stat tracker from a Bluesky developer. On Thursday, a spokesperson told Business Insider that they had gained 2.5 million followers in the past week.

When departure announcements and Bluesky links started appearing in my X-feed on Wednesday, I became curious about how the app was attracting so many new accounts.

After using it for a few days, I can see why it would appeal to people who were once loyal to .

Likes are fun, replies are replies, and the color palette is blue and white.

Still, the social media network is small compared to X, which reported 250 million daily users in March, and Meta’s alternative, Threads, which has nearly 275 million monthly users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Users reported periodic outages in Bluesky’s app and site this week; the company said this was due to an issue with one of its internet providers.

If you’d like to sign up, here’s how to get started.

Choose your unique handle

Handles on Bluesky look like a URL created with a unique username that you chose when you first logged in to https://bsky.app. It can contain numbers or dashes; you can change this after your profile has been created. I tried adding an underscore, which is allowed on X, but it didn’t work.

I was able to find people by searching their usernames without having to remember the entire handle.

Although there are over 17 million users on the app, the early stages of a platform are a great time to get exactly the username you want. It will appear on your profile (with a small sun icon if you are a new user). Here is also an intro from Bluesky.

Posts, or ‘skeets’, are pretty well known when you use X

Bluesky’s posts, known as ‘skeets’, work similarly to posts on X (formerly known as ‘tweets’). You can post text, photos, videos or find GIFs to upload.

There is a 300 character limit for sketches and they appear in different categories including messages, replies, and media. When you create a post, you can decide who can interact with it and tag others with the @ symbol.

Discover people to follow

If you’re like me, the biggest problem when starting over with a new app is tailoring your feed to the content you like to see. That takes time and following the right accounts, feeds and topics.

To find more accounts posting your favorite type of content, you can use the ‘Feeds’ feature. A chosen feed will be pinned to your homepage, and you can choose to see only posts from accounts that have joined the same feed.

For example, I joined the ‘Blacksky’ feed to connect with more black users on the app.

If you have a friend who is leading the way and has built a strong community on Bluesky, he or she can create a custom “Starter Pack” and share it with users and feeds they think you should follow.

Of course, you can also search for people to follow based on their username.

After spending some time on Bsky, as users call it, I think my transition from X was smooth. The layout and color scheme make me feel immediately at ease.