Bluesky’s Active User Base Is Shrinking, and Remains Tiny Compared to Threads and Twitter/X

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch last week:

Decentralized social network Bluesky was one of the bigger beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X in November 2024, following the U.S. elections. But now, nearly two years later, the social network and would-be X competitor is struggling to hold on to its momentum.

According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky’s mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million.

As always, take all third-party analytics and usage data about app usage with an enormous grain of salt. Third-party data companies can only estimate this data, they can’t know it. It’s like comparing polling data to election results.

But I think it’s obviously true that Threads and Twitter/X both have hundreds of millions of active users, and Bluesky has like maybe 10 million. Even if Bluesky has three times more actual users than Similarweb’s data suggests, that would still suggest that Bluesky’s user base is an entire order of magnitude smaller than Threads or Twitter/X. And Mastodon is so small that no one even mentions it anymore in these comparisons. Mastodon and the whole ActivityPub world make Bluesky look large and culturally relevant.

Small is not necessarily bad. My favorite of these networks, personally, is Mastodon. I like my community there because it’s small and generally free of both drama and nonsense. But small precludes mainstream cultural relevance.

★ Friday, 21 August 2026