Bluesky says it had over 9M users as of September 6, after adding 3M new users in the week or so since Brazil blocked X, and that video support is “coming soon”
Bluesky keeps growing: The company announced that as of Friday morning, it had added 3 million new users, bringing its total user count to more than 9 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bluesky’s jump follows an earlier usage spike among people leaving X in Brazil, making the service’s growth unusually tied to a disruption at a larger social platform rather than a gradual acquisition cycle.
The move also extends a recurring pattern: Bluesky previously saw a sharp account increase after Musk raised the prospect of charging X users, and later X product-policy changes again coincided with an influx to Bluesky.
First-order effects
- Bluesky gains more than 3 million users in roughly a week, taking its reported total above 9 million and rapidly enlarging the audience it must serve.
- The planned addition of video support gives those new users a broader publishing format as they establish habits on the platform.
Second-order effects
- X’s unavailability in Brazil creates an immediate opening for Bluesky and other substitutes to capture users’ social graphs and creator attention during the interruption.
- A larger installed base raises the value of closing feature gaps such as video; competitors’ controversial changes have already been associated with a one-day 500,000-user gain for Bluesky.
Third-order effects
- If platform disruptions and policy shifts repeatedly trigger migration, social-network competition may become more event-driven: challengers can build meaningful user bases through episodic defections rather than only steady growth.
- The later slowdown in Bluesky mobile-app daily-user growth after November’s surge suggests that converting migration spikes into durable activity—not just sign-ups—will determine whether these openings reshape the market.
The trend: Bluesky is part of a broader fragmentation of social networking, in which changes at incumbent platforms can rapidly redirect users to smaller alternatives.