Bluesky crossed 47 million registered accounts in October 2026. In July, according to Similarweb estimates reported by TechCrunch, about 3 million people opened its mobile app on an average day. Those two numbers describe the same network, and the distance between them is the most important of all the Bluesky statistics for anyone deciding how much effort to put there.
This page collects the figures that hold up, names where each one comes from, and flags the ones that get misquoted. Registered account counts come from Bluesky itself or from the public counter it points to. Active user figures are third-party estimates, because Bluesky does not publish them. Keep that split in mind, and cite accordingly.
Registered users: the number Bluesky reports
Bluesky’s own 2025 Transparency Report, published January 29, 2026, put registered users at 41.41 million at the end of 2025, up from 25.94 million a year earlier. That is growth of nearly 60% in a single year. The count includes accounts hosted on Bluesky’s infrastructure and accounts on independent servers across the AT Protocol network.
The company announced “over 43 million global users” with its Series B in March 2026. By August, TechCrunch reported nearly 46 million registered users, citing the public stats page run by developer Jaz at bsky.jazco.dev, which Bluesky’s own communications reference. That tracker showed 46,880,472 accounts on October 6, 2026, and TechCrunch described the network as having 47 million registered users in an October 15 article.
At the pace shown in October 2026, roughly 17,000 to 20,000 new accounts a day, the counter projects 48 million by mid-December and 50 million in spring 2027.
For context, the 2025 Transparency Report is also the best official source for how the network is policed, with figures on moderation reports and actions alongside the user count. If you need a single number from Bluesky itself, rather than from a tracker or a reporter, that report is the one to cite.
Treat these as accounts, not people. The count includes dormant accounts, duplicates, and bots. It is the widest possible measure of the user base, which is why it is also the most quoted.
The growth timeline, milestone by milestone
Bluesky’s growth came in bursts tied to events on other platforms, more than in a steady climb.
The service opened to the public in February 2024 after an invite-only period during which it reached about 3 million users. It hit 10 million on September 15, 2024, and 13 million on October 24, 2024. The post-election surge in November 2024 took it past 20 million by November 20 and to 25.9 million by December 19.
The pace slowed in 2025. Bluesky reached 30 million around January 29, 2025, roughly 36 to 37 million by June, and 40.2 million on November 9, 2025. It closed the year at 41.41 million. In 2026 it added about 5.5 million more by October, a slower rate than either of the prior two years.
The pattern is useful for planning. Spikes in sign-ups have followed controversy or policy changes at X. Each spike brought a wave of new accounts, and a share of those accounts went quiet within months. Expect future growth to follow the same shape.
Active users: what third parties estimate
Bluesky does not share daily or monthly active user figures. Every active user number you see comes from an outside estimate, most often Similarweb’s panel data.
According to Similarweb, as reported by TechCrunch on August 11, 2026, Bluesky’s mobile app had 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 2026, to around 3 million. TechCrunch also noted a DAU-to-MAU ratio of roughly 29% in June, about the same stickiness as Threads.
Earlier estimates were higher. Several trackers put daily active users near 3.5 million in late 2025, which worked out to about 9% of registered accounts using the app on a given day.
Two cautions. These figures cover the mobile app; web use through bsky.app and third-party clients adds some unknown amount on top. And panel-based estimates carry real error bars. The direction of travel is clearer than the exact level: active use has declined over the past year even as sign-ups continued.
How Bluesky compares to Threads and X
Bluesky is small next to the two platforms it is most often compared with.
In the same TechCrunch report, Similarweb estimated Threads at 147 million daily active users in July 2026, up 21.3% year over year, with website visits up 112% to 471.6 million. X’s daily active users were estimated at 123.7 million in July, and its app had around 302 million monthly active users in June 2026.
Put side by side, Threads had roughly 49 times Bluesky’s daily mobile audience, and X roughly 41 times. Bluesky’s case for brands has never been reach. It has been audience composition and the quality of engagement in specific communities, notably journalists, academics, scientists, developers, and parts of the political and arts worlds.
Content volume: posts, likes and follows
The same public tracker that counts accounts also counts activity across the network. In October 2026 it showed about 3.33 billion total posts, 3.95 billion follows and 18.44 billion likes since launch.
Spread across registered accounts, that works out to about 70 posts and 390 likes per account. Those averages hide a heavy skew. A small share of active users produce most posts, which is typical of every social network, and many registered accounts have posted rarely or never.
For marketers, the useful takeaway is that conversation on Bluesky clusters around communities and custom feeds, not a single algorithmic timeline. A feed built for a niche, such as science journalism or indie game development, can concentrate an engaged audience that a raw follower count would undersell.
Funding and the company behind the network
Bluesky began as a project funded by Twitter in 2019 and became an independent public benefit company. It announced its Series B in March 2026, citing more than 43 million global users at the time.
As of mid-2026, Bluesky did not run ads. It has experimented with other products and revenue ideas, including Attie, an AI-powered app first launched in March 2026 for building custom feeds and expanded in October 2026 to let anyone build websites, games and other projects on top of the network. TechCrunch framed those moves as part of an effort to reinvigorate activity as engagement on the core app softened.
The absence of ads matters for how you plan. There is no paid shortcut to reach on Bluesky. Distribution depends on organic posts, replies, reposts, starter packs and custom feeds.
Where Bluesky still punches above its size
Raw totals undersell Bluesky in a few places, and they are worth naming because they shape who should bother.
Journalists are the clearest case. A visible share of reporters and editors moved their primary social presence to Bluesky during the 2024 and 2025 waves, and many still share their work and source requests there. For a PR team, that makes Bluesky a listening post: you can see what a reporter is working on, what frustrates them, and which stories they share from competitors. Following the right 200 reporters on Bluesky can be more useful than following 2,000 on X.
Academics and scientists form a second cluster. Starter packs, the curated follow lists Bluesky introduced in 2024, made it easy for whole research communities to move together. If your audience reads peer-reviewed work, or if your thought leadership depends on credibility with researchers, the active slice of Bluesky may contain a larger share of your audience than its size suggests.
Links are the third factor. Publishers have long complained that X limits the reach of posts with outbound links. Bluesky’s default experience does not carry the same reputation, and custom feeds let communities decide what surfaces. For a brand that publishes original research or long-form content, that can mean more click-through per post, even from a smaller audience. Measure it on your own account before you assume it.
The common thread is concentration. Bluesky’s 3 million daily users are not a random slice of the internet. They skew toward people who write, publish, research and argue in public for a living. If those are the people you need to reach, the small number is less of a problem than it looks. If you sell mass-market consumer goods, it probably is the problem.
The Registered-to-Active Gap, and what it means for brands
When we evaluate a social channel for clients, we look at a ratio we call the Registered-to-Active Gap: daily active users divided by registered accounts. It tells you how much of a platform’s headline number is a living audience.
For Bluesky in mid-2026, the math is about 3 million daily mobile users against roughly 46 million accounts, or around 6.5%. In late 2025 the same ratio was closer to 9%. A falling ratio means the registered count is increasingly made up of people who tried the service and left.
That does not make Bluesky a bad channel. It makes it a specific one. A 6.5% active ratio on a network built around tight communities can still deliver more meaningful engagement for a B2B brand, a newsroom, or a researcher than a far larger network where its audience is a rounding error. The gap tells you not to plan around the 47 million. Plan around the communities in your field that are still active, and test whether they respond.
A practical test: post consistently for 60 days, track replies and reposts from accounts you would want as customers or partners, and compare that to the same effort on Threads or LinkedIn. Use your own numbers, not the headline totals, to decide.
How to cite Bluesky statistics without getting caught out
Most errors in Bluesky coverage come from mixing measures. A few rules keep you accurate.
Say “registered accounts” or “registered users” when you cite the 40-plus million figures, and name the date and source. Bluesky’s Transparency Report is the official year-end figure; the jazco.dev counter is the live one.
Say “estimated” when you cite daily or monthly active users, and name Similarweb or whichever firm produced the number. Note whether it covers mobile only.
Do not divide one source’s active users by another source’s registered count from a different month without saying so. The ratios in this article use figures from the same period, and they are still approximations.
And date everything. Bluesky statistics from 2024 describe a network that was growing fast; figures from 2026 describe one that has stopped losing sign-ups but is losing daily users. Both are true, and both will look different by next year.