The website tracks how fast Bluesky is growing in near real time

The social network Bluesky has grown by millions of new users in the past two weeks as former X users have fled the Elon Musk-owned site for alternatives since the election. If that fact brings you happiness, you can watch Bluesky’s growth in real time in the most satisfying way possible.

Software engineer Natalie Bridgers called her Bluesky user counter website “a bit of a day project” when she posted a link on Bluesky last month when the site had more than 12 million users.

The site shows a counter ticking upwards one number at a time as users join at a rate of between 10 and 11 new users per second as of Monday afternoon. Nearly two weeks since Election Day, and Bluesky has since grown to more than 19 million users.

“I used the ticker mainly because I thought it looked neat, but it also provided more visual feedback about the actual speed of how fast Bluesky is growing,” Bridgers tells Fast Company. She added the other data underneath the counter, showing the users-per-second growth rate and time until next update, “because I wanted more transparency about when updates happen and why the counter is going up at the speed it’s going up at.”

Interest in Bluesky comes as X users have noticed a marked difference in their feeds over the past several months. The X algorithm boosted posts from Musk and right-leaning accounts after Musk endorsed Donald Trump in July, a study from researchers at Queensland University of Technology found, and with Musk now set to play a role in Trump’s second term, a growing number of X users have decided to take their screen time elsewhere.

There are other Bluesky user counter sites too, like one Bridger was inspired by made by assistant professor and Bluesky user Theo Sanderson, proving there’s an audience eager to watch how fast the social network grows. Bridger’s site describes itself as an “almost-real-time Bluesky user count,” and a screenshot from Bridger’s site was shared by Polling USA, a popular social media polling aggregator.

Bridger joined Bluesky in May 2023 and says she was drawn to the site’s open API, decentralization, and “the community there because people are generally more forgiving and kind there” compared with X. If the site’s millions of new users feel the same way, Bluesky could soon find itself as a serious replacement for X users turned off by the site’s turn since Musk’s purchase and foray into politics.