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Meta’s Threads is losing ground to social media start-up Bluesky by taking advantage of the exodus of users from Elon Musk’s X following the election of Donald Trump.

Since Election Day, Bluesky app usage in the US and Britain has skyrocketed by almost 300 percent to 3.5 million daily users, according to data from research group SimilarWeb. The site got a boost when academics, journalists and left-wing politicians abandoned X, whose billionaire owner is a prominent supporter of the newly elected president.

Before November 5, Threads had five times more daily active users in the US than Bluesky, which has just 20 full-time employees and was initially funded by Twitter when Jack Dorsey was CEO. Now Threads is only 1.5 times bigger than its rival, according to Zelfstandeweb.

Bluesky’s growth in the US and Britain comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to deliberately reduce the prominence of political content on his apps, including Facebook and Instagram.

The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to address the conflict between the parties and avoid being drawn into debates over freedom of expression. Trump, who has long lambasted social media platforms for allegedly censoring conservative voices, previously labeled Meta “an enemy of the people” and threatened Zuckerberg with jail time if he returned to office. Last month, Trump said he liked Zuckerberg “a lot more now” because he “stayed out of the election.”

This is in contrast to X, which under Musk’s ownership has scaled back content moderation in order to distribute more freewheeling content.

Since launching last July, Threads has prioritized engaging content from accounts that users weren’t following, a model closer to that of its photo app Instagram. However, Meta reversed that choice on Thursday.

This week it also quickly introduced the ability for users to build ‘custom feeds’ around topics or people they want to follow, mimicking existing Bluesky capabilities, after testing the feature for just five days.

The moves led to speculation that Meta was trying to curb Bluesky’s rise.

Meta said: “We regularly introduce new Threads features and updates – dozens of them in the past few months alone – to serve the now more than 275 million Threads users. And we will continue to share more as we work to serve this growing community.”

Experts noted that the Threads timeline was ineffective for people looking for content about real-time events.

“There’s a point where they’re going to have to make this decision, whether they want to bring back the political content and real-time (conversation),” said Katie Harbath, a former policy director who worked on Meta’s election strategy for a decade. “Especially if these Bluesky numbers remain high.”

Adam Tinworth, a lecturer in journalism at City St George’s, University of London, described Bluesky as “essentially a Twitter spin-off” and thus a “natural replacement” for those disillusioned with X.

“Threads is a very different proposition (and) completely botched it during the US election because it pushed news and politics out of the feed,” he said.

Bluesky was unveiled by Dorsey in 2019 with the goal of developing a single standard or protocol on which social platforms and other developers could build more customized offerings.

Now led by digital rights activist and software engineer Jay Graber, users can post short messages and images in an interface much like that of by users with the click of a button.

However, the platform has also suffered more glitches and outages as it grows rapidly, with questions about how it will create a working business model in the future. Initially funded by Twitter, it raised $15 million in venture capital last year, and $8 million the year before that.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Threads, said last week that the app had “generated more than 15 million signups in November alone and had been running for three months with more than a million signups per day.” But he added: “Now we have a lot more work to do.”