Bluesky's user count crossed 35 million this week, a milestone that generated predictable celebration from the decentralized social media community and predictable skepticism from everyone else. The milestone deserves both responses โ simultaneously remarkable and incomplete.
Remarkable because Bluesky hit 10 million users just 18 months ago. Incomplete because the growth number tells only half the story. Data from third-party analytics firm SocialBlade, cross-referenced with Bluesky's own publicly available activity metrics, suggests that 30-day active user retention sits at approximately 31% โ meaning roughly 69% of users who sign up for Bluesky are not meaningfully active 30 days later.
"Bluesky has a discovery problem," explained Dr. Priya Mehta of the Oxford Internet Institute. "New users arrive, they don't find their people immediately, and they leave. The platform's strength โ its decentralized, interest-based structure โ is also its onboarding weakness."