Bluesky added a pronouns field to profiles the day after the midterms. The company says the timing was a coincidence, and says activity on the site doubled.
Bluesky, the social network many people see as a calmer alternative to X, added a dedicated pronouns field to user profiles on Wednesday. That was the day after the midterm elections. Many users saw meaning in the timing. A Bluesky spokesperson says it was a coincidence and that the feature had been in the works for two weeks.
Before this, anyone could type their pronouns into the text of their bio. There was just no separate box for it. Now there is one. One user noted it can be found under the edit profile button. Gizmodo's reporter confirmed it is live on their own account.
The spokesperson said a standard format for pronouns already existed, and several apps built on Bluesky's technology were using it. Bluesky then added it to its own platform. Those apps are known as the Atmosphere, meaning the community of software built on Bluesky's technology.
Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider said posts and likes doubled the day after the election. He also said the site is seeing new people join and old users return. Before the polls even closed, Bluesky said it was handling 200% of its usual data traffic.
Some of the mood on the site showed up as a joking meme urging people to put pronouns in their bios. When the new field arrived, some users linked the two.
Bluesky started as a small, decentralized Twitter clone, conceived in part by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Its numbers climbed after Donald Trump's 2024 re-election. They have since slipped. As of July, daily users on mobile fell 25.6% in a year to about 3 million. That is still a small fraction of X's daily audience.
For anyone weighing an alternative to X, the article describes Bluesky as calmer for most users. It has a less infuriating algorithm, very little spam, and close to zero AI content if you choose to avoid it. Trolls tend to get blocked in large numbers.
The tradeoff is a strong lean toward one political crowd. The article calls the site a political bubble, and says Schneider is concerned about that. If an X alternative free of Elon Musk sounds appealing, Bluesky may suit you. If not, it likely will not.
It is unclear whether the activity spike will last. The July decline shows that surges around big news moments have not always turned into steady growth.
Bluesky's new pronouns field is optional, and the bigger question is whether this week's surge lasts after a year of falling mobile use.
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