Bluesky Introduces Trending Topics as User Base Tops 25 Million

Bluesky’s user base recently surpassed 25.9 million, doubling from 13 million in October 2024. However, growth has tapered compared to earlier months, with the current statistic of note being the massive 2-10x increase in interaction rates over the last six weeks.

While impressive, Bluesky’s numbers are still modest compared to Threads, which boasts an active user base over ten times larger, and X’s immense user count. Even so, as an independent platform, Bluesky has managed to see major success simply by attempting to provide an experience close to Twitter’s classic functionality – with the new trending topics feature being the next step in giving its users the features that they have been asking for.

Announced just before Christmas, the feature allows users to track and participate in popular conversations, lumping posts about major topics into easily-accessible parts of the site. The implementation works through systematic detection of frequently mentioned terms, presenting a dynamic list of trending discussions – exactly how Twitter handles the whole trending post system.

Users can tap through a topic to explore related posts, while features like mute word transfers and display customization cater to user preferences. For now, the feature is available only in English, with plans for broader accessibility in the future. According to Bluesky, this is just the first iteration of the feature, with improvements to follow based on user feedback.