Social community Bluesky is updating its app to allow anyone to share after they’re livestreaming on Twitch, and including specialised hashtags, known as cashtags, for discussing publicly traded shares.
The brand new options may probably assist Bluesky capitalize on a current increase in new installs, which have arrived within the days after the X deepfake news went mainstream.
On X, customers had been asking its built-in AI bot Grok to show photographs of actual girls and generally minors into sexualized photographs with out consent. This week, California’s lawyer common opened an investigation into xAI’s chatbot over the proliferation of the “nonconsensual sexually express materials.”
Within the wake of the controversy, Bluesky noticed its downloads surge within the U.S. In response to new information from market intelligence supplier Appfigures, day by day downloads of Bluesky’s iOS app have jumped almost 50% from the interval earlier than information of the deepfakes reached essential mass.
The agency says Bluesky sometimes sees round 4,000 installs within the U.S. per day, however from December 30, 2025, by way of January 6, 2026, Bluesky’s iOS downloads within the U.S. totaled round 19,500. From January 7, 2026, by way of January 14, downloads grew to 29,000 — a 49% enhance.
In the meantime, cashtags will enable the app to catch as much as considered one of X’s extra standard use circumstances: discussing shares. To create a cashtag, you place a greenback image earlier than the inventory ticker image (e.g., $AAPL for Apple).
The concept for cashtags was first launched by stocks-focused social community Stocktwits, which now has over 10 million customers, earlier than the tags had been later adopted by Twitter in 2012.
As well as, Bluesky says it’s increasing entry to the “Dwell Now” experimental characteristic that lets customers add a short lived “LIVE” badge to their avatar to point after they’re streaming on-line. Presently, this characteristic solely helps Twitch and doesn’t enable anybody to go reside straight on Bluesky itself.
The increase in exercise on Bluesky comes after the community noticed declines in downloads and utilization final 12 months. In April 2025, Appfigures famous that the social networking startup’s downloads dropped to new lows, and day by day common customers on cellular gadgets had declined nearly 40% by the tip of October, per Similarweb information. Pew Research reported last year that numerous influencers now have Bluesky accounts, however they nonetheless are inclined to publish extra frequently on X.
This implies that the switching prices are increased than some would anticipate relating to swapping out one real-time social community for an additional. Including new options will solely be a part of the battle for Bluesky; it is going to additionally must discover a method to get customers to vary years of ingrained habits.
