Bluesky CEO reveals they have just 20 employees despite passing 21,000,000 users
Everything's coming up Bluesky, as the new social media platform's CEO has revealed that they have just 20 current employees, despite boasting over 21,000,000 users.
The apparent exodus from Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) following both the US election and the removal of the block feature has been widely publicized, and in its stead many have been moving to 'new' platform Bluesky.
There have been many social media alternatives that have cropped up following the Tesla and SpaceX owner's acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion back in 2022.
Advert
Platforms like Mastodon, cohost, and even Instagram's own Threads have served as momentary reprieves, but nothing has managed to stick the landing - at least until now.
Bluesky has now more than certified itself as a legitimate alternative, as it quickly reached 15 million users recently, and a long list of celebrities have already made the jump.
In a thread celebrating the platform reaching 20 million users (which is now, at the time of writing, 21.5 million) Bluesky CEO Jay revealed that the team consists of "about 20 full-time employees," which works out to around one million users per employee - a big responsibility!
This was indeed followed up with the announcement that the platform is hiring new staff, which include a 'Feed Algorithmics Engineer' and 'Community Marketing Engineer', but there's little you can do when growth is as fast as the site is currently experiencing.
X, comparatively, has around 1,000 current employees - which remains still a fraction of the 7,500 that worked there prior to Musk's purchase of the site.
It definitely makes sense for X to have significantly more employees, considering it boasts over ten times the active daily users of Bluesky, but it's amazing that the latter is performing as well as it is with such a small team.
The sky really is the limit for Bluesky though, as it's showing zero signs of slowing down in the wake of mass user migration.
It remains at the top of the free app charts on the US Apple App Store, beating out other popular applications like ChatGPT, TikTok, and YouTube.
Comparatively, X sits all the way down in 44th place, although that could instead reflect the number of users that already have the social media platform already installed on their phone, whereas Bluesky is a new experience.
Jay also mentioned that the largest countries in terms of users on the site are the United States, Japan, and Brazil, and this has been the case "since our invite-only days as well."