Forty-six million registered accounts. About three million people who open the app on an ordinary day. Both numbers describe the same network, Bluesky, and it's hard to put them in one sentence without feeling that one of them is lying. The first comes from the company itself, cited by TechCrunch in August. The second is a Similarweb estimate for daily users of the mobile app in July, 25.6% below the previous year. Between them, fifteen to one. There are two possible readings. Either the network is slowly dying and nobody wants to say so, or we're measuring the wrong thing. It's worth seeing which one survives the facts. #### The sum that doesn't add up The rise was fast and not very organic. Bluesky passed 10 million users in September 2024, reached 25.9 million in December and closed 2025 at 41.4 million, pushed mostly by people leaving X after the US election: around 10 million new accounts between November 2024 and January 2025. Then comes the other side of the chart. In the fourth quarter of 2024 the app averaged 22.1 million monthly active users; in the second quarter of 2026, 10.7 million. A drop of about 52% in a year and a half. In June, 10.4 million, down 27.2% from a year earlier. Where did those people go? The data doesn't say. It only says X didn't win them back: its monthly mobile audience fell about 3% in June and its daily one 7%, to 123.7 million. The one that grew was Threads, with 147 million daily users in July, up 21.3%. My reading is simple and not very flattering. For a few months, opening a Bluesky account was a gesture, almost a statement. The gesture is complete at sign-up. A habit requires someone on the other end on a Tuesday morning, and you can't buy that with indignation. #### So why would anyone put $100 million into this? In March this year, with the active base already shrinking, the company closed a $100 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto. On the 9th, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO to become Chief Innovation Officer, and the helm went to Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic (WordPress.com), as interim CEO. That isn't the résumé of someone brought in to tune a microblogging app. It's the résumé of someone who spent years at a company built on open software. The thesis, and it's mine, not the company's: the Bluesky app is the demo. The product is the AT Protocol, the open standard underneath, where a person's identity, followers and posts aren't locked to a single company. The ecosystem the community calls the Atmosphere runs past a thousand apps and services. Bluesky is one of them. The biggest by far, but one. That has an uncomfortable consequence for anyone who measures everything by monthly users of the app: the metric no longer captures the thing the company says it's building. #### The objection that is right All of this is open on paper. In practice, most people still sit on Bluesky's own servers, and the largest AppView on the protocol, the service that gathers and presents posts, is Bluesky's, with much smaller ones beside it. A decentralized protocol whose only big node belongs to a startup with an interim CEO is, for now, a promise. I concede this almost entirely. Almost. What keeps me from closing the case is happening outside the house. Eurosky, a European non-profit initiative, opened username.eurosky.social accounts in February 2026, hosted in Falkenstein, Germany, and subject to GDPR and the Digital Services Act. In a public thread, an ecosystem developer mentioned more than 15,000 active users after roughly three months on Eurosky, and around 4,000 on Blacksky. Those are community numbers, unaudited, and should be read that way. But Blacksky already runs its own stack, independent of Bluesky. And Europe's W Social, on the same protocol, requires identity verification to post, comment and message, with accounts still visible in other apps on the protocol. Rules of coexistence almost opposite to Bluesky's, and nobody had to ask permission. There's also Skylight, a TikTok alternative that passed 380,000 users in January, after the TikTok deal in the US was finalized. Small. Real. The most visible limit is something else. The protocol has been essentially public, and Eurosky expected private data to arrive later in 2026. I found no confirmation that it has landed. Without it, whole categories of product stay out of reach. Eurosky likes the email comparison: if Bluesky shut down, the protocol would carry on, the way email carries on when a provider closes. Maybe. But nobody has ever judged email by the monthly users of SMTP.