• by Colin Kirkland , July 7, 2023

Meta’s Threads app, which has already onboarded tens of millions of users, is not the only Twitter rival app thriving. Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey’s decentralized social messaging app Bluesky Social has reached one million downloads.

According to estimates from app-store intelligence company data.ai, Bluesky has gained around 300,000 new installs in the past week.

While these numbers do not compare to Twitter’s 72 million first-time installs within the past four months -- around 518,000 per day -- or Threads’ 10 million installs within seven hours, Bluesky operates as invite-only, making it more difficult to measure public interest.

Bluesky has also been known to pause sign-ups due to concerns over potential technical issues.

In terms of region, Bluesky is most popular in the U.S., which makes up 40% of total installs, followed by Brazil (9.5% of installs), Japan (8.5%), Thailand (7.5%), and the U.K. (4.6%).

Unlike Threads or Mastodon, which are both focused on integrating with the ActivityPub protocol, Bluesky is building the AT Protocol, its own decentralized social networking protocol. By committing to a decentralized model, all three Twitter alternatives are technically placing more power in the hands of users, who can create sub-communities that have influence over the rules that govern them, as well as how their content is distributed.

Bluesky also announced $8 million in seed funding this week, with plans to launch a paid service in order to monetize without reliance on ad vertising support.