Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only

Would you pay to use X, the platform formerly known as Twitter? Apparently, all of these new Bluesky users don't seem so keen to do so.

Bluesky, the "decentralized" X-alternative social media platform, just had its biggest influx of new users ever on Tuesday. This happened just one day after Elon Musk made headlines during a livestream with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he plans to charge all of X's users a "small monthly payment" to use the platform.

As of 2:40pm ET, more than 42,000 new users have joined Bluesky, making Tuesday, September 19, the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year. At publishing time of this article, Bluesky had 1,113,820 users in total.

The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website "Bluesky Stats." Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.

It's impossible to know whether Musk's comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.

Bluesky is a direct alternative to the platform formerly known as Twitter. It's backed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. (Although, we should note that Dorsey is not involved in the day-to-day running of Bluesky. The CEO of Bluesky is Jay Graber. Dorsey sits on the board of directors.)

In fact, before Musk acquired Twitter, the company now known as X, it even funded Bluesky. It provided $13 million in order to build a new "decentralized" version of the platform.

Furthermore, Bluesky's previous record-setting signup day was July 3, when 32,325 new users joined the platform. And that occurred amid the July 4th weekend in the U.S., when Musk abruptly made other unpopular changes to Twitter that restricted the content people could see without signing up, a move that alienated casual Twitter users, and benefitted those with paid subscriptions. Rather than paying, it appeared that tens of thousands of users preferred to just get their social media needs met elsewhere.

Mashable reached out to Bluesky for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

While Musk has previously mentioned his idea of charging all X users to post on the platform, those comments were made late last year, amid all of the other changes he ended up instituting shortly after he acquired it. Clearly, based on the reaction after his recent comments, some were hearing this for the very first time.

Whether or not Musk will go through with charging everyone for X is unclear. But for Bluesky, it is pretty clear that Musk simply floating these ideas is good for growth.