Author: Jean Burgess, Professor and Associate Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Queensland University of Technology

After Elon Musk bought Twitter (now rebranded X) in 2022, disaffected users began to seek alternatives. Alongside Meta’s Threads and the open source project Mastodon, Bluesky was one of several contenders. Threads benefited from Meta’s existing user base but has failed to capture the popular imagination. Mastodon has proven complicated and difficult to grasp for most ordinary users and so use remains fragmented. Bluesky seemed promising but was in invite-only mode at the time and growth was muted. But in recent weeks, the migration to Bluesky from X seems to have reached a tipping point, as large parts of the…