Social media site Bluesky has soared to 21-million users following Donald Trump's election win.

Bluesky is a micro-blogging social media site which was set up by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, among others.

The site was founded in 2019, soaring to 21-million users worldwide after November 6th - when Donald Trump won the US presidential election.

Mr Trump was backed by Elon Musk, the current owner of social media site X, formerly Twitter. 

In the company's first Irish interview on Breakfast Business with Joe Lynam, Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang said this level of post-election growth had not been predicted. 

“I always say that it's impossible to see the future, and so I don't think we had any predictions of what was going to happen with user growth [post-election],” she said.

“We were prepared for a scenario of growth if that happened, because we've actually seen growth surges the last year... in Japan, Brazil and the UK.”

"False narrative"

With large numbers of Bluesky users fleeing from X due to far-right bots and for political reasons, Ms Wang said there has been a “false narrative” created about the site “catering to one group of people over another”.

“That's never been the point of Bluesky,” she said.

“We're really not building any tool for any particular viewpoint, but rather letting people create their own spaces online, and part of that is enabling them to feel free to safely communicate in their spaces.”

Ms Wang said the platform will “welcome anybody who is willing to have healthy dialog online”.

"Govern their own spaces"

In terms of moderation, Ms Wang said Bluesky has “taken a page" out of Reddit's book.

“Reddit has given community moderator tools to users so they can go govern their own spaces better,” she said.

“But many of those tools are manual, you have to use keywords [and] they don't go from subreddit to subreddit.

“So we've taken that even a step further by giving programmatic abilities to users to label posts.”

In an example, Ms Chang said moderators would be able to label movie ‘spoilers’ across the network and hide them, if you choose.

“What we believe is that centralised systems have a really hard time meeting the needs of diverse communities, especially if their needs don't violate the terms of service in community guidelines,” she said.

“We want to give those tools to users to go and govern their own spaces.”

Subscription option

In order to make money from Bluesky without advertisements, Ms Wang said the site will have a subscription option at the end of this year.

“What's really important about subscriptions is that we will not put core features like speech behind a paywall, but we know that users want to have more ways to self-express, either through like custom aesthetics, avatar frames, or higher resolution images and so those are the subscriptions that we're going to come out with,” she said.

“A behaviour that we've seen is that users are supporting each other on the app, and that's really exciting - where people who've created feeds or moderation labels are getting paid through Patreon [and other platforms] by other users.

“So in the future, we'll probably build a payments network and we'll help facilitate more payments across the network so that people can build a career and a living on the Bluesky ecosystem and then we'll just take a percentage of that transaction.”

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Split image: L, Bluesky and X icons on a phone, R, Donald Trump.