Elon Musk campaigned relentlessly for US President-elect Donald Trump, attracting on his social media platform X/ Twitter Republican voices as well as users from other similar apps popular with the far-Right, like Gab, Parler and Truth Social. But it is also turning out to be a good opportunity for rivals of X to do business as an influx of users is being seen on Threads and Bluesky.

Both the platforms are relatively new. Meta’s Threads was launched in July last year while Bluesky, conceptualised by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and developed in parallel with Twitter, started its journey in October 2021 (and became publicly available in February).

A decentralised social network — it operates on independently run servers as opposed to centralised — Bluesky has added over 700,000 new users in the last week and now has 14.5 million total accounts. The new users are mostly from the US, said a company spokesperson. In fact, each time X gets caught on the back foot, there is a bump in the user base for Bluesky. In August, the site added one million new sign-ups in three days after X was forced to close down in Brazil (the ban has been lifted). X’s recent announcement that it would let blocked users see posts from those who have blocked them helped Bluesky add 500,000 users in one day.

Threads is now the top-rated “free” app in Apple’s App Store in the US. The platform has more than 275 million monthly users, up from 150 million in April. The company hasn’t mentioned if the increase has anything to do with the election results. In July, X claimed 550 million people visited the platform every month.

“What’s interesting to me is the diversity of communities coming to Bluesky last week,” Bluesky chief operating officer Rose Wang told Bloomberg.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University, has 248,000 followers on X but picked up 26,000 followers on her first day on Bluesky this week. On Monday night, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she was “back” on Bluesky, saying “Good God it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings”.

The President-elect has been posting on his social media platform, Truth Social, even after his X account was reinstated in late 2022 and it’s only since August Trump’s frequency of posting on X has picked up. He currently has 94 million followers on X and only 8 million on Truth Social. The parent company (Trump Media & Technology Group) of Truth Social lost $19.2 million in the last quarter, according to an earnings report released on the same day Trump won back the presidency.

Last year, Instagram and Threads head Adam Mosseri said: “There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc. — to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news.”