Hajra Naz
Bluesky, the decentralized social network, had a strong moment back in November 2024. It was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X. That exodus followed the U.S. elections that year. But now, nearly two years later, the picture looks different. Bluesky is struggling to hold onto that early momentum.
New data paints a clearer picture of this decline. According to Similarweb, a digital intelligence provider, Bluesky’s mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026. That’s down 27.2% compared to the previous year. The trend continues elsewhere too. Mobile daily active users kept falling as well. In July, that number dropped 25.6% year-over-year. Daily active users now sit around 3 million.
These numbers tell an important story. Bluesky’s app continues adding new registered accounts overall. But fewer people are actually using the mobile app regularly. This suggests something specific. Some users who joined Bluesky out of frustration with X after the election haven’t stuck around for the long haul.
There’s an even bigger takeaway here, though. This isn’t just about a shrinking post-election bump. Bluesky’s app has lost more than half of its monthly active users compared to its late-2024 peak. That means usage kept shrinking, even after the initial post-election surge faded. The numbers make this clear.
Bluesky’s quarterly average sat around 22.1 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2024, according to Similarweb. By the second quarter of 2026, that number had fallen to 10.7 million. That’s a decline of roughly 52%.
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Building Beyond Bluesky
Despite these declining numbers, the users who stayed remain genuinely engaged. Bluesky’s smaller community is still relatively active. Its stickiness rate measures the ratio of daily to monthly active users. That rate sat at roughly 29% in June. That’s about the same rate seen on Threads.
For Toni Schneider, Bluesky’s new CEO, these numbers might not be as alarming as they first appear. The company’s focus isn’t solely on making the Bluesky app itself succeed. Instead, much of the focus centers on the underlying protocol behind it, called AT Proto. The goal is enabling that protocol to power a growing number of separate social apps, services, and communities.
That broader vision is already playing out. Projects like BlackSky and Eurosky are growing steadily. Other AT Proto-based apps are gaining traction too. That includes Skylight, a video-focused app that has found early success of its own.
Bluesky has also been launching new products directly. That includes Attie, an AI-powered research tool. The company is also working on something new. It’s adding support for private data within Bluesky. This shift could attract a different type of user altogether. Specifically, it could appeal to people less interested in the public square. Instead, it may draw users more focused on private networking and smaller communities.
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There’s another important point buried in Similarweb’s data. It doesn’t necessarily suggest that former Bluesky users have gone back to X, despite some early fears.
Instead, the data tells a more complicated story about X itself. X’s worldwide monthly active users on mobile were down about 3% year-over-year in June. Its mobile daily active users dropped even further. In July, that number fell 7%, landing at 123.7 million.
Still, it’s worth keeping some context here. X remains a genuinely large social network. It had around 302 million monthly active users on its app as of June 2026. Web visits to X are actually growing too. Those visits rose 5.3% year-over-year in July, reaching 4.7 billion.
If there’s a platform worth watching closely right now, it may be Threads. It’s not entirely clear why Threads is gaining ground. It could be benefiting directly from Bluesky’s declining engagement. Or it may simply be attracting an entirely new group of users, people who never used a Twitter-like platform before at all.
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Either way, the numbers for Threads are strong. The Meta-owned app saw its daily active users climb 21.3% year-over-year, reaching 147 million in July 2026. Website visits grew even more dramatically. Those visits were up 112% year-over-year, reaching 471.6 million.
As for Bluesky’s own reporting, the company shares limited data publicly. Bluesky’s own public stats indicate it now has nearly 46 million registered users in total. However, the company doesn’t share specific figures on daily or monthly active usage through its own channels.
