Bluesky Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Says App’s Success Is Due to People “Running Away” from Twitter

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Bluesky and Twitter, believes the surge in Bluesky’s user base is more about people abandoning his old company than actively seeking out the alternative.

“I think people are running away from X [Twitter], rather than running to something on Bluesky,” Dorsey said on the “In Good Company” podcast. “That’s not a great way to build a product, unfortunately. We want people that are running to us for a particular thing that they couldn’t do before.”

Bluesky, originally a Twitter project in 2019, became independent in 2021. Dorsey stepped down as Twitter’s CEO that same year, leaving its board in 2022. He later resigned from Bluesky’s board, criticizing it for “literally repeating all the mistakes” of Twitter.

Still, he remains optimistic about Bluesky’s direction.

“Bluesky has built something that I wanted it to build and I’m excited about, which is this algorithm store, being able to choose your own algorithms,” he said. “That is a reason why people will run to it eventually… but it’s not something that people care about right now. What they care about right now is not being in X [Twitter] for whatever personal reason.”

Bluesky saw rapid growth following Trump’s reelection, jumping from 3 million to 25.9 million users in 2024. CEO Jay Graber emphasized its resilience: “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us… We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on.”

Unlike Twitter, Bluesky won’t algorithmically push ads to users, reinforcing its user-first approach.