Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, disgruntled users have sought alternatives. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, a doppelganger, is the newest challenger.

Bluesky, an independent initiative financed by Twitter while Dorsey was CEO, has garnered popularity among journalists and celebrities over the past month as a new alternative to Musk’s Twitter.

Dorsey is one of three Bluesky directors. Twitter no longer owns it, according to the corporation.

With 50,000 members, the invite-only beta platform is a minnow compared to Twitter and Meta. However, according to Similarweb, global desktop, and mobile app visits climbed to roughly 1.5 million in April from less than 300,000 in March and 15,000 in February.

The website upgraded its database on Thursday after new users quadrupled the day before, and Bluesky trended on Twitter. The Apple app store’s top-10 social networking applications include politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jim Farley, and Chrissy Teigen.

Musk, who purchased Twitter in October, has alienated some users by charging $8 for the blue ticks that used to signal celebrity and loosening moderation restrictions. As a result, platform failures and malfunctions have also grown.

Dorsey criticized Musk over the weekend, ending the billionaire bromance that helped sell the firm.

Dorsey told Bluesky, “No,” when asked if he still felt Musk, whom he had called the “singular solution I trust” to “extend the light of consciousness” at Twitter, was the greatest steward.

“Nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad. Nor should the board have compelled the transaction. It failed. But it happened and all we can do now is build something to prevent it,” he said.

Dorsey said he was “happy” that Bluesky and Nostr engineers were creating something fresh. Dorsey folded his entire Twitter stock, worth over $1bn at $54.20, into the privately owned Twitter in October, making him one of its largest shareholders.

Like Twitter, Bluesky lets users submit brief messages and photographs and get followers. Users celebrate leaving Twitter and establishing their language. Sky tweets are called “skeets.”

Bluesky customers receive one invitation every week.

Technical problems remain. A “hell thread” glitch caused everyone who replied to popular topics to receive notifications when others commented over the weekend. Users flooded one thread with jokes, memes, and obscene images.

Dorsey launched Bluesky in 2019 to create a unified protocol for social platforms and other developers to construct more customized products. He claimed at the time that Twitter would be a client. However, this is uncertain.

This decentralized social media paradigm creates an interoperable system with no central authority in response to difficult platform moderation disputes. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber called its technology “a foundation for next generation social apps that can bring back the openness and creativity of the early web” in a blog post.

Tim Bray, a former Amazon executive, and early Bluesky partner, said the team hopes to deliver “composable moderation” in the future.

That feature lets users choose from third-party algorithms to filter offensive speech or focus on a topic. However, he added that it had not been delivered, and who would build these algorithms is unknown.

Bluesky may face moderating and technological concerns like Mastodon and Hive, which have tried to replace Twitter. Last week, Graber stated that her team “were already stretching the server” due to increased demand.

Another issue is the team’s and builders’ finances. Bluesky obtained $13mn in capital last year and became an independent LLC, but its financing and monetization are unknown. Bluesky’s Graber suggests letting consumers control their data to eliminate advertising.

A business model? Bray asked.