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Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/AP Facebook Twitter LinkedIn In this story An X alternative • You control your feed • Ignore some content • Post text, photos, video • How to start • If you move • Find

your friends • Paid tier coming

When X-alternative Threads exploded onto the scene in July 2023 with more than 100 million sign-ups in just five days, the launch of Meta’s then-new social media app appeared to represent

the first serious challenge to X, the microblogging platform owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter.

The Threads app has since ballooned to more than 275 million monthly users.  

Now another serious X competitor called Bluesky is grabbing headlines. The idea started in 2019 as a project of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey while he was still Twitter’s CEO.

In recent months, Bluesky usage has more than doubled, and in the aftermath of the presidential election, it leaped past 24 million users. The apparent hope among those who have flocked to

Bluesky is that political rancor and polarization won’t follow.

As of mid-November, another Twitter/X rival, Mastodon, had around 919,000 active users.

For a time recently, Bluesky Social was the third most popular free app in Apple’s App Store, trailing only Threads and ChatGPT. It was also No. 3 among free Android apps in Google Play

behind Threads and TikTok.

Tech site The Verge wrote, “Bluesky seems to have a real shot at becoming the next place to get the pulse of the internet.”

What’s behind Bluesky appeal, and will it resonate with older adults?

Chief executive Jay Graber has described Bluesky as “billionaire-proof” and “radically different than anything that has been done on social media before.”

During an appearance on CNBC cable network, she explained that Bluesky does not control what you see on the service. It has “no single algorithm showing you things,” Graber said. “If you

want to see just cats or just art, you can do that.”

This decentralized approach follows open-source principles. In simple terms, that means it’s designed so a single entity can’t control it.

want

You can set content filters to hide adult-oriented, sexually suggestive or graphic material or set warnings before you can view such posts.