Bluesky Gives Up Chasing X, Pivots to Reddit-Style Communities as Engagement Halves

The End of the Public Square

Bluesky, the decentralised social network once billed as the natural successor to Twitter, is officially changing course. In an interview with CNBC published this week, Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang said the company no longer sees its future as a rival to Elon Musk's X. Instead, Bluesky is taking direct inspiration from Reddit, aiming to become a 'discovery mechanism' built around interest-based communities rather than a single chronological feed.

'The public square is not the direction we want to go in,' Wang said, adding that the company is 'very inspired by companies like Reddit.'

A Stark Engagement Slide

The pivot comes against sobering numbers. Daily posters on Bluesky spiked to roughly 1.5 million during the post-US-election surge in late 2024, but have since fallen to around 600,000 — roughly where the platform stood in September 2024. A Pew Research Center analysis found engagement dropped about 50% from its mid-November 2024 peak, while US unique mobile visitors fell 44% in nine months, from 2.7 million in June 2025 to 1.5 million in March 2026. Bluesky claims over 44 million registered users, but retention — not registration — is its central problem, especially against X's estimated 450 million users.

An Industry-Wide Reckoning

Bluesky isn't alone. Meta quietly launched 'Forum' in May, a standalone Reddit-like app built on Facebook Groups, pitched as 'a dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and communities you care about.' The convergence suggests the era of the algorithmic open feed may be winding down across the industry.

Bluesky's January 2026 roadmap foreshadowed the shift, promising to make custom feeds 'more central to the app' and to build features that feel 'less like just scrolling through posts and more like hanging out,' alongside topic tags and better discovery tools.

Decentralised Moderation, Familiar Risks

Speaking at SXSW London on 2 June, Wang framed the move as returning control to users, arguing incumbents are too big to change course: 'Facebook and Twitter are huge... Also, they are basically AI companies at this point.' Bluesky intends to let individual communities set their own rules for speech and moderation rather than relying on a central system. But unlike Reddit, Bluesky has no advertising model or sales infrastructure, meaning the pivot will depend entirely on organic community stickiness — precisely the thing it has been losing. The company is also working to improve video upload speeds and lengths as it modernises its video features.