14.5 million users

X rival Bluesky experiences an influx of users after the US election

The Bluesky app, an alternative to Elon Musk's online platform X, has experienced a growth spurt since the US presidential election. In the past week alone, 700,000 users have joined the app, the company told the technology blog "The Verge". Most of them come from the USA.

Bluesky now has 14.5 million users and is therefore still significantly smaller than X. The service that Musk once bought as Twitter is likely to have hundreds of millions of users. The tech billionaire does not provide exact figures.

However, Bluesky has so far struggled to expand its user base. In February, the service still had four million users. The ten million mark was broken in mid-September - after X was temporarily blocked in Brazil.

The tech billionaire and Tesla boss Elon Musk is an active supporter of Donald Trump and has become a close confidant of the US President-elect. He dismantled X's previous measures against misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Critics also accuse X of tolerating hate speech. X rejects this. In recent days, some X users have announced that they are leaving the platform due to its development under Musk.