The Bluesky active user decline has turned into something harder to explain away than a post-election hangover. According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky’s mobile app drew 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. Mobile daily active users fell 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million.
Those numbers sit a long way from the peak. Bluesky’s quarterly average monthly active users hit around 22.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, when the platform rode a wave of discontent from X users following the US elections. By the second quarter of 2026 that figure had fallen to 10.7 million, a decline of roughly 52%. The platform did not merely give back its surge; it kept shedding users well after the surge had passed.
Bluesky now has nearly 46 million registered accounts, but it does not publish specific active-usage data. Account registration and actual engagement are evidently moving in opposite directions.
Bluesky Active User Decline in Context
The platform’s stickiness rate, the ratio of daily to monthly active users, held at roughly 29% in June. That places it level with Threads and suggests the people who remain are genuinely engaged. What the headline figure captures is the much larger group that tried Bluesky and then quietly stopped opening the app.
Toni Schneider, Bluesky’s new chief executive, may read these figures differently from a growth-at-all-costs operator. The company’s stated ambition is not just to run a competitive social app; it is to grow the AT Protocol, the underlying decentralised infrastructure, into a platform that powers a constellation of social services. On that measure the registered-user and monthly-active counts are only part of the story.
Projects such as BlackSky and Eurosky are building on AT Protocol, and a video-focused app called Skylight has found early traction. The company has also released Attie, an AI-powered research tool, and is working on adding private-data support to Bluesky itself. That last feature could attract a cohort less interested in public discourse and more interested in private networking, widening the addressable audience beyond the Twitter refugees who arrived in late 2024.
The fundraising behind that ambition is substantial. SocialPilot, citing Bluesky’s own disclosures, puts total funding at over $123 million: an $8 million seed round in July 2023, a $15 million Series A in October 2024, and a $100 million Series B in April 2025 led by Bain Capital Crypto. The Series B was disclosed in March 2026. For a company positioning itself as infrastructure rather than merely an app, that capital base looks appropriate for the ambition.
Registered-user growth, if not active engagement, still points upward. The same SocialPilot analysis found that Bluesky grew nearly 60% across 2025, expanding from roughly 25.94 million to 41.41 million registered users across both Bluesky’s own infrastructure and independent servers on the AT Protocol network.
Threads Is the Platform Gaining Ground
Similarweb’s data offers one reassurance for Bluesky’s camp: there is little evidence its departing users have drifted back to X. X’s worldwide monthly active users on mobile were down around 3% year-over-year in June 2026, and its mobile daily active users fell 7% in July to 123.7 million. X remains large, with around 302 million monthly active users on its app as of June 2026 and web visits up 5.3% year-over-year in July to 4.7 billion, but it is not obviously recapturing the audience it lost.
The platform collecting users at pace is Meta‘s Threads. Its daily active users climbed 21.3% year-over-year to 147 million in July 2026, and website visits surged 112% year-over-year to 471.6 million. Meta had already reported 150 million daily active users for Threads as of October 2025, according to TechCrunch. Whether those users migrated from Bluesky, from X, or arrived fresh from outside the microblogging category entirely is not clear from the data.
What Similarweb’s figures do clarify is the competitive shape of the space. Threads is now the growth story. Bluesky is the protocol story. X is the incumbency story. SociallyIn’s demographic analysis of Bluesky shows that roughly 62% of its users identify as male and around 35% are in the Gen Z cohort aged 18 to 24, a concentrated, highly online base that other platforms would not mind absorbing.
The test for Schneider is whether AT Protocol’s expanding ecosystem can generate enough developer momentum and user utility to justify Bluesky’s valuation and its investors’ patience. The app’s next inflection point may depend less on winning back lapsed users and more on whether private-data features can open a genuinely new market before Threads consolidates its lead.
