After Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, he made clear that free speech would be the norm. Less than a year later, he renamed it X and largely made good on that promise. (For what things were like there beforehand, see the Twitter files.)

But many were not happy with the new freer Twitter/X and a revolt spilled over. They gravitated to a new platform, Bluesky, an American public benefit corporation that promised to be a better Twitter. It had started as a project at Twitter in 2019 but gone independent in 2022.

Holding themselves to higher standards

From the beginning, Bluesky was touted by its supporters and users as a better class of platform.

For example, Science informed us in November 2024 that “ … The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky. After recent changes to Elon Musk’s X, a gradual migration turns into a stampede”.

At the end of January 2025, Nature announced “Bluesky’s science takeover”: “70% of Nature poll respondents use platform. Roughly 6,000 readers answered our poll, with many declaring that Bluesky was nicer, kinder and less antagonistic to science than X.” Linked articles like “A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky” and “Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty” give some sense of the mood.

The main complaint was that Twitter/X tolerated too much “misinformation and hate.”

Bluesky started to grow rapidly, especially during the U.S. 2024 election campaign. From Kai Kupferschmidt at Science:

“It’s just gone completely crazy,” says Mike Young, a science communicator in Denmark who gives social media workshops to scientists. He and his colleague Lasse Hjorth Madsen did an analysis in August mapping science communities on Bluesky. They found more than 20,000 influential scientists—people on the platform who were followed by at least 30 other scientists in the same network. When they repeated the analysis last week with an increased threshold of 40 scientist followers, the new number of influential scientists was almost 40,000. It is likely to be many times that now, Young says.

“Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky,” November 20, 2024

Similarly, the European Federation of Journalists, representing 295,000 European journalists, decided to stop posting on X at the end of 2024:

After the US elections, EFJ pointed out the threat to democracy and freedom of expression posed by the cooperation between the president of the most powerful country in the world, Donald J. Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who is also the owner of social network X and has been appointed to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) when Donald J. Trump takes office as president on January 20, 2025.

“We cannot continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists”, said the president of EFJ, Maja Sever.

Jack Peat, “European Federation of Journalists to stop posting content on X,” The London Economic, December 2, 2024

“Proclaims the death of the media” probably refers to Musk’s adage, “Don’t hate the media, become the media” — that is, social media levels the playing field between small and big players. The journalists seemed to find the idea threatening, despite the advantage their professional expertise gives them.

So how well did kinder and gentler work out?

Two incidents pop to mind:

By April 2025, Adobe (as in Acrobat and Photoshop) had gotten driven from Bluesky. At Futurism, Noor al-Sabai reports,

It seems the only thing Bluesky hates more than Donald Trump is brands that promote artificial intelligence — and Adobe, the makers of Photoshop and Acrobat, had to find that out the hard way…

Hilariously, a Photoshop account likely created by Adobe’s unsuspecting social media team also got the Bluesky bully treatment. Though the software account’s original post was similarly deleted in apparent shame, archivally-minded Bluesky users made and posted screen recordings of the incredible replies before it was kiboshed.

“Hello You Sniveling Little Bitch,” reads one of the Photo replies, which is still up. “Are You Prepared To Defend Yourself, Unlike Your Foolish And Weakened Parent Company?”

“Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky, April 9, 2025

Used to a more professional environment, the company minimized its presence on Bluesky. It posts regular announcements on X.

Second, when conservative student organizer Charlie Kirk was shot on September 10, 2025, BlueSky attracted attention for the eruption of comments like “” and “The person who motivated the shooting of Charlie Kirk was Charlie Kirk” and “RIP Charlie Kirk, you would have loved politicizing the shooting of Charlie Kirk.” (New York Post)

It got to the point where the platform had to caution users:

“Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky’s Community Guidelines. We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone. Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we’re committed to fostering healthy, open conversations,” the social media platform wrote in a post. Martha McHardy, “Bluesky issues warning to any users celebrating Charlie Kirk assassination,” Newsweek, September 10, 2025

And the numbers?

According to DuckDuckGo’s Searchassist, Bluesky has about 45 million users. Meta’s Threads has over 400 million. X has over 561 million.

There’s a moral to this story: If we are departing for a kinder, gentler social medium, we will not get our wish if we pack the hate with us.