Bluesky Statistics 2026: User Count, Growth and Activity

The Bluesky user count stood at 47,229,534 registered accounts early on October 28, 2026 (UTC), according to the Jaz Bluesky stats counter, a public tracker built on the network's open data. Bluesky itself says it has over 44 million users as of May 2026, and its own 2025 Transparency Report says the network grew from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users during 2025.

Registered is not the same as active. On an average day in October 2026, 994,806 accounts liked at least one post and 566,452 accounts published at least one post, from the same tracker's daily feed. Similarweb, reported by TechCrunch in August 2026, put the Bluesky mobile app at 10.4 million monthly active users in June 2026 and about 3 million daily users in July 2026. So the honest answer to "how many users does Bluesky have" is two numbers: about 47 million accounts exist, and somewhere between 1 and 3 million people use it on a given day.

This page keeps both numbers apart all the way down. You get a dated table of registered users by month, one source per row, then daily activity by month, users by country, who uses Bluesky in the US, engagement data for brands, the post limits that matter when you publish, and a side by side of Threads vs Bluesky vs Mastodon users. Every figure names its publisher and date. Anything we calculated is marked as derived, with the arithmetic shown.

If you landed here because you are deciding whether Bluesky is worth posting to, skip to the section on how brands and creators post, further down. The short version: it is a small network next to Instagram or Threads, but the people who stay are active, and posting there costs little if the post is already made for your other networks.

On October 28, 2026 we opened every page cited here and read the figure in place. For the registered user count we used Bluesky's own announcements first: the one million post from September 2023, the February 2024 post that removed invite codes, the Series A and Series B posts, the yearly moderation and transparency reports and the FAQ. Where Bluesky did not publish a number, we used reporting from TechCrunch and Nieman Lab that quotes the company.

For live counts we read the Jaz Bluesky stats page and its public JSON feed, which publishes a daily row back to March 2023 with posts, likes, and the number of accounts that posted or liked. We downloaded the feed, grouped the days by month and averaged them. In September, October and November 2024 the feed has days with partial data (one day shows 1,431 posters against a usual 600,000), so in those months we left out any day below half the month's median. That rule is ours, and it only touches those three months.

For usage and audience we used Similarweb's public page for bsky.app, Similarweb figures quoted by TechCrunch, and the Pew Research Center social media fact sheet. For the post limits we read Bluesky's developer docs and the open source post schema on GitHub. We did not use any other statistics roundup as a source, because most of them copy each other and some mix registered and active users in one line.

Two rules apply below. A number always sits next to its publisher and date. Where two sources disagree, both appear, and we explain why they differ instead of picking the bigger one.

Bluesky did not grow in a straight line. It grew in three jumps, each set off by something that happened somewhere else, and in slow months between them. The first jump came when it dropped invite codes. The February 6, 2024 post says more than three million people were on the network that day, and Bluesky's 2024 review adds that over a million new users signed up in the week after.

The second jump came from Brazil. When Brazil's top court blocked X in late August 2024, Bluesky gained more than 2.6 million users in a few days, and over 85% of them were Brazilian. By September 16, 2024 the total had passed 10 million. The Jaz feed shows what that did to activity: average daily posters went from 172,575 in August 2024 to 733,430 in September (derived, using the partial day rule described above).

The third and biggest jump followed the US election in November 2024. Bluesky's year in review says it added over 13 million users in the last month and a half of 2024, ending the year at 25.94 million. The single busiest day in the whole feed is November 18, 2024, with 2,789,693 accounts liking at least one post and 7,533,695 posts published.

After that, growth slowed and kept going. TechCrunch reported on January 6, 2025 that Similarweb saw Bluesky web traffic grow by less than 10% month over month in December 2024, after 189% in November. Still, Bluesky added 15.47 million users across 2025 and about 5.82 million in the first ten months of 2026 (derived from the table above). Spread over the 301 days from December 31, 2025 to October 28, 2026, that is about 19,300 new accounts a day, or roughly one every four or five seconds. A live Bluesky user counter on theo.io showed it ticking up at 0.2 users per second when we checked, which matches.

So when someone asks whether Bluesky is still growing, the registered count says yes, at about a third of its 2025 pace. The activity numbers in the next sections tell a different story, and both are true at once.

Bluesky does not publish daily or monthly active users. TechCrunch said so plainly in August 2026. That leaves two kinds of outside numbers, and they measure different things.

The first is network activity. The Jaz daily feed counts every account that liked a post and every account that published a post on each day, from any app on the network. In October 2026 the averages were 994,806 likers and 566,452 posters a day (derived from October 1 to 27). Someone who reads but never taps like is not in these counts, so the real number of daily readers is higher than 994,806. Someone who likes and posts on the same day is in both counts, so you cannot add the two together.

The second is app usage. Similarweb estimates how many phones open the official Bluesky app. Per TechCrunch, mobile daily users fell 25.6% year over year to around 3 million in July 2026, and the ratio of daily to monthly users was about 29% in June, roughly the same as Threads. That counts readers, but only on phones and only in the official app.

Put together, a fair answer to how many people use Bluesky daily in late 2026 is: around 1 million accounts do something visible on an average day, and around 3 million open the mobile app. Both figures are a small share of the 47.2 million registered. Daily likers equal about 2.1% of registered accounts and daily posters about 1.2% (derived: 994,806 and 566,452 divided by 47,229,534).

For a brand this matters more than the headline count. If you post once on a weekday, the audience that can see it that day is closer to a million people than to forty seven million. That is still a lot of people for a niche account, which is why the engagement rate you get on Bluesky tends to look better than the raw follower numbers suggest.

Every network has a gap between accounts and people. Bluesky's gap looks bigger than most because it is one of the few networks where anyone can count the accounts in public, while the active numbers come from outside estimates.

Accounts pile up for ordinary reasons. People sign up during a news wave, look around and stop opening the app. Some people have a second account for work. Bots get created and banned; Bluesky's 2025 Transparency Report says it expanded staffing in May 2025 specifically for bots, spam and other scaled activity. None of those accounts disappear from a running total of sign ups.

The activity side has its own blind spots. The Jaz feed misses quiet readers. Similarweb misses anyone on the web, on a desktop, or in a third party app built on the AT Protocol, and Bluesky's Series B post says over a thousand such apps are used every week. So the truth sits between the numbers: more than the 994,806 accounts that like something on a typical day, fewer than the 10.4 million monthly mobile users Similarweb estimated for June 2026 plus everyone on the web.

TechCrunch's August 2026 piece uses Similarweb's quarterly averages to put a size on the decline: average monthly mobile users went from about 22.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 10.7 million in the second quarter of 2026, a fall of about 52%. The Jaz feed tells the same story at a different scale, with daily likers down 56.6% from November 2024 to October 2026. Two independent methods agreeing on the direction and rough size is the most solid fact on this page.

The figure below lines the five counts up on one scale, so you can see how far apart they are.

If you search for the Bluesky user count you will find 40 million, 44 million, 46 million and 47 million on the same results page. Most of the gap is timing. Bluesky's FAQ still said "over 44 million" with a May 2026 date when we read it in late October, while the live counter had moved past 47.2 million. A page written in August that quotes TechCrunch will say nearly 46 million. None of them is wrong for its date.

The rest of the gap is definition. Bluesky's own reports describe "users". The Jaz counter counts accounts it has seen on the network. Bluesky's 2025 Transparency Report notes there are thousands of Personal Data Servers, the majority hosted independently by third parties, which means some accounts live outside Bluesky's own servers and still count as part of the network. And the counter's word "users" does not subtract deleted, banned or inactive accounts, which is why a live counter only ever goes up.

Then there are numbers that sound like users but are not. "Monthly active users" from Similarweb is an estimate for one app on phones. "Visits" on Similarweb's bsky.app page are website sessions, not people. Pew's 4% is a share of US adults who say they ever use Bluesky. Each answers a different question, so put the publisher and date beside any figure you quote, the way the tables here do.

A practical rule for writing about Bluesky: use the live registered count when you want the size of the network, the Jaz daily counts when you want to know how many accounts are doing something, and Similarweb when you want app usage. Never put two of them in one sentence as if they measured the same thing.

The safest statement is that Bluesky's audience is mostly English speaking and centered on the United States, with real communities in the UK, Japan, Germany, Canada and Brazil. Similarweb's bsky.app page puts the US at 48.67% of web traffic for September 2026, five times the next country, and the same page lists the UK, Japan, Germany and Canada after it.

Brazil is the country most often missing from these lists, and it should not be. Over 85% of the 2.6 million users who joined in early September 2024 were Brazilian, which makes Brazil the single largest national wave in Bluesky's history. Those accounts still count in the registered total. How many of them stayed active once X returned in Brazil is not something any public source measures.

Japan shows up in two unrelated places: as the third largest source of web traffic, and as one of the three countries that sent the most legal requests in 2025 according to the Transparency Report. Neither tells you how many Japanese users there are. They do tell you that Japanese is a language worth checking if you sell there; Bluesky's custom feeds make it easy to follow posts in one language.

What to do with this as a marketer: if your customers are in the US, UK or Canada, Bluesky's audience overlaps with yours. If they are mainly in a market that is not on any of these lists, test with a handful of posts before you invest time, and look at where your own replies come from. Our guide to promoting an app on social media has a network by network view that helps here.

Pew's Americans' Social Media Use 2025 report, published November 20, 2025, groups Bluesky with Threads and Truth Social as platforms used by about one in ten or fewer US adults, and says Democrats and Democratic leaning independents are more likely than Republicans to use Bluesky. That political lean is the most consistent finding about Bluesky's audience, and it shapes the tone of the network. Posts about policy get heated replies; posts about craft, tools, science, books and games usually do well.

For gender and age, the only public figures come from website visitors, not account holders. Similarweb's bsky.app page put visitors at 63.86% male and 36.14% female when we read it, and named 18 to 24 as the largest age group. Treat those as rough, because people who use the app on a phone are not in them.

For an app maker or a small business, the useful reading is this: the people who stayed on Bluesky skew toward tech, media, academia, art and politics, and many of them left a bigger network on purpose. They notice spam fast and reward people who talk like people. A product that helps creators, writers, developers, researchers or hobbyists will find its audience faster than a mass market consumer brand. Solo app makers will find a fuller plan in our indie app marketing guide.

The best public engagement data for Bluesky comes from Buffer, which publishes medians from posts sent through its scheduler. Its State of Social Media Engagement 2026 report, published March 5, 2026, puts the median Bluesky post at about 4 interactions in 2025, down from about 5 in 2024, while the number of Bluesky posts in its data nearly quadrupled. Buffer counts likes, comments and reposts for Bluesky and says not to rank that against the follower based engagement rates it gives for other networks.

Format still matters. In the same report, Bluesky video posts had a median of 5 interactions, image posts 4, and link posts and text posts 3 each. That is a small sample size per post, but the order is the same one you see on most networks: a picture beats plain text, and video edges out a picture.

Timing matters more than on most networks. Buffer's best time to post on Bluesky study of more than 3 million posts, published August 5, 2026, found Saturday at 5 p.m. was the best slot with a 6.89% engagement rate, followed by Saturday at 6 p.m. (6.81%) and Sunday at 9 a.m. (6.77%). Saturday averaged 6.17% and Sunday 6.05%, while Thursday was lowest at 3.44%. Weekday late mornings were the quietest, and weekday engagement tended to peak in the evening. Times are local to the audience.

Two cautions. These are medians for accounts that use a scheduler, which skews toward brands and creators rather than individuals. And Bluesky gives you no reach or impression counts, so any rate you calculate is per follower. If you want to compare your Bluesky posts with your Instagram or LinkedIn posts, use the same formula on every network, which our engagement rate calculator does, and read which social media KPIs to track before you pick one.

Most people who read a page like this are deciding whether one more network is worth the time. On Bluesky the cost is mostly the extra post: a picture sized and compressed under 1 MB, alt text, and a caption cut to 300 graphemes. If you already make posts for Instagram and LinkedIn, that is ten or fifteen minutes each time, and it is the step that gets skipped first in a busy week.

Spreadcast takes that step off your list. You start from one line, or from an App Store link at /start, and it designs the image in your brand, writes a caption for each network that fits that network's limits, and publishes to Bluesky alongside Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon and the rest from one calendar. Not every scheduler covers Bluesky, Mastodon and Telegram; in Spreadcast they sit next to Instagram on the same features list.

On size, Threads vs Bluesky users is not close. Meta said in its June 16, 2026 newsroom post that Threads had reached 500 million monthly active users, and Engadget reported that this was about 100 million more than the August before. Similarweb's daily estimate for Threads in July 2026 was 147 million, roughly fifty times its estimate for the Bluesky app. Pew found twice as many US adults using Threads as Bluesky in 2025, 8% against 4%. Our Threads statistics page has the full series.

Size is not the only thing that decides where a small brand should post, though. Threads is fed by Instagram, so a lot of its audience arrives through Meta's recommendations and scrolls past quickly. Bluesky's smaller audience is denser in some niches, and its chronological Following feed plus over 40,000 custom feeds mean a post can be found by topic without fighting one algorithm. Buffer counts a median of about 4 interactions per Bluesky post, which on a small account is often more replies than the same post gets on Threads.

Mastodon is smaller again. The Mastodon statistics feed that powers joinmastodon.org counted 744,878 monthly active users across 7,266 servers on October 27, 2026. It is worth posting there if your audience is developers, open source users or people in Europe who care about where their data lives, and it costs almost nothing extra if the post already exists.

The practical answer for most small teams is not to choose. Post to Threads for reach, Bluesky for conversation, and Mastodon if your niche lives there, and make each post once. If you do this by hand, keep a short Bluesky version of every caption in your content calendar so the 300 grapheme limit never catches you at publishing time. The Threads side of that routine is in our guide to scheduling Threads posts.

This is where a tool earns its price. Spreadcast writes the Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon versions of the same post, each within its own limit, with the same designed picture, and puts them on one calendar. Pro is $29 a month for publishing to 10 social accounts in any mix of networks, as the pricing page lists.

Most Bluesky accounts were opened by people leaving X, so the comparison comes up in almost every conversation about the network. The same TechCrunch article that reported Bluesky's decline gives Similarweb's figures for X: about 302 million monthly users of the X app in June 2026, down about 3% year over year, and 123.7 million daily mobile users in July 2026, down 7%. X's web visits rose 5.3% year over year in July, to 4.7 billion.

Set against Bluesky's estimated 3 million daily mobile users, X is about 41 times larger on a typical day (derived: 123.7 million divided by 3 million). Pew's 2025 survey shows a smaller gap among US adults, 21% for X against 4% for Bluesky, because Pew asks whether people ever use a platform, not whether they opened it today.

Two things follow for anyone planning where to post. First, Bluesky is not a replacement for X in size and is unlikely to become one soon on these trends. Second, the people who left X for Bluesky and stayed are a specific, self selected group: they chose a smaller network on purpose and tend to be loyal to it. A brand that shows up there with useful posts and real replies is speaking to people who are paying attention, which a bigger, noisier feed cannot promise.

Both, depending on what you count, and it is worth being exact about it because this is the question most articles get wrong in one direction or the other.

Registered accounts are growing. From 41.41 million at the end of 2025 to 47.23 million on October 28, 2026 is a rise of about 14.1% in ten months (derived). That is slower than 2025, when the count rose about 59.6%, and far slower than 2024, when it grew almost ninefold from 2.89 million.

Activity is shrinking slowly. Daily likers in the Jaz feed fell 12.2% from October 2025 to October 2026, and daily posters 10.3%. Similarweb, via TechCrunch, saw mobile monthly users down 27.2% year over year in June 2026 and mobile daily users down 25.6% in July. The Jaz decline is gentler than Similarweb's, probably because the Jaz feed also counts people using Bluesky on the web and in third party apps.

The decline has also flattened. Looking at the monthly table, daily likers lost about 40% between January and October 2025, but only about 19% between January and October 2026, and the months from June to October 2026 sit within a narrow band of roughly 980,000 to 1,050,000. A network that loses its news wave crowd and then settles is a different thing from one that is emptying out.

Bluesky's own focus has also moved toward the protocol. The company's Series B post talks as much about the more than a thousand apps built on its AT Protocol as about the Bluesky app, and TechCrunch's August headline makes the same point. For a marketer that changes little in 2026: your posts on Bluesky are read in the Bluesky app and a growing number of other apps, and the counts above are the size of the room.

Bluesky runs on the AT Protocol, an open network where accounts live on Personal Data Servers and any app can read and write to them. That is why a Bluesky handle can be your domain, and why apps other than Bluesky can show your posts. The Series B post of March 19, 2026 gives the scale: over a thousand apps built on the protocol are used every week, the SDK sees over 400,000 downloads a month, and the network holds about 20 billion public records.

For anyone who posts through software, the protocol's limits are public too. Bluesky's rate limit docs give each account 5,000 points an hour and 35,000 a day for creating, changing and deleting records, with a new post or like costing 3 points. That works out to at most 1,666 creates an hour and 11,666 a day, far above what any brand needs. The limits exist to slow down bots that follow or like everything, and the docs say they were set with the most active human users in mind.

The open design also means there is no developer app to apply for and no review before you can post through the API, unlike Meta's networks. That is one reason Bluesky support arrived in scheduling tools quickly, and why tools like Spreadcast can connect a Bluesky account with an app password in under a minute. If you want an AI assistant to post for you, our social media MCP server page covers how Claude and ChatGPT reach Bluesky and other networks, and our comparison of the best social media MCP servers shows which ones support it.

Yes, if your customers are the kind of people who are on it, and if posting there does not cost you a separate afternoon. No, if you would have to make Bluesky content from scratch every week while your Instagram sits empty.

The case for it: about a million accounts are active every day, and the audience leans toward tech, media, science, art and independent creators. Developers, indie app makers and B2B tools often find their early users here. Founders who already post on LinkedIn or Threads can reuse most of it, which is the idea behind founder led marketing.

The case against: the active audience is a fraction of the registered one and has been shrinking slowly since late 2024. Bluesky gives you no reach numbers, so measuring is harder. And consumer brands that sell mainly to people outside the US, UK, Canada, Japan or Germany may find few customers here. If that is you, spend the time on the networks in our where to post guide first.

A sensible test is four weeks: three posts a week, at least one on Saturday, each with an image and alt text, plus a starter pack of your niche. If the posts get replies from people who could become customers, keep going. If they get nothing after a month, stop and move the time elsewhere. Our list of 52 post ideas for an app gives you a month of topics, and the guide to batching a month of content in one afternoon shows how to make them in one sitting.

Here is what posting to Bluesky looks like by hand for one post. Open your design tool, find the brand colors, place the screenshot or photo, export, check the file is under 1 MB, write alt text, write a 300 grapheme caption, open Bluesky, upload, post. Then do the same for Threads, Instagram and LinkedIn with different sizes and caption limits. For a small team that is close to an hour per idea, and the reason most brand accounts on Bluesky go quiet after a month. Keeping the look the same across all of them is a second job, covered in our guide to brand consistency without a design team.

Here is the same post with Spreadcast. You type one line, or let it pick up a moment such as a new App Store version or a ratings milestone. It designs the image in your brand kit, with your app's real screenshots in an iPhone frame if you have an app, writes a caption for each network inside that network's limit, and schedules it to Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon and the rest. You approve it with one tap, or let it run on autopilot. Analytics then shows followers and interactions per network, and likes, comments, reach and views per post, so you can see whether Bluesky is earning its place.

You can try it on your own brand before paying: Free makes 3 posts to download for one app. Pro is $29 a month or $290 a year and publishes to 10 social accounts in any mix of networks. If you would rather not subscribe, the Post Pack is $19 once for 10 posts designed and published, and the 30 Day Pass is $39 once for everything in Pro for 30 days. All paid plans have a 7 day full refund. Details are on the pricing page, and you can start at /start with an App Store link, a website or a short description of your brand.

If you already work in Claude or ChatGPT, the Spreadcast MCP server lets the assistant design the post, write the captions and schedule it to Bluesky from the chat, with you approving before anything goes out. Our guide on how to schedule Bluesky posts compares this with the free and paid ways to do it by hand.