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Bluesky’s user base has grown by 2 million users – about 15% – since Donald Trump won the US election last week. But the emerging social platform doesn’t just serve as a refuge for left-leaning X users who are disillusioned with Elon Musk’s alliance with the president-elect. A community of Taylor Swift fans, or Swifites, has also laid its foundation on the decentralized social app.
Nearly 13,000 Bluesky people have signed up for “Swifties.social“, indicating their participation in the Taylor Swift fan community. Other fans of artists such as Beyoncé (about 900 members) and BTS (about 4,500 members) also appeared.
These fan-based domains, which run within the main Bluesky social server, came from a project undertaken by Bluesky developer Samuel Newman in May 2023, before he was hired by the company. (Newman was also behind third-party client Graysky before taking a job at Bluesky.) Newman’s tool allows anyone to claim subdomain handles from a domain you own. For example, Newman bought kawaii.social, which now has about 450 members. Using his tool, we were technically able to grab “techcrunch.kawaii.social” as our domain, but unfortunately, that may not be as consistent with our branding as our current “techcrunch.com” address.
“It’s taken off in ways I didn’t expect. I originally made the tool thinking people might want a ‘bsky.london’ handle or something like that, but it turns out the handle is a great indication of what type of account you’re using, and Stan Accounts absolutely loves being able to identify “They identify themselves that way,” Newman told TechCrunch via Bluesky DM.
The Swifties.social domain did not see much growth at first, with around 2,000 users joining until August 2024, when X was temporarily blocked in Brazil.
“Bluesky got a huge influx of Brazilian users, including many Swifties,” Newman said. “The tool went viral, jumping to nearly 8,000 handles. Then, after the election, another wave of Swifties arrived and the tool went viral again, jumping to 12,800!
This wave of growth from Brazilian users occurred when Newman added handles for BTS fans (army.social) and Beyoncé fans (beyhive.social).
In the grand scheme of things, users with these fan domains make up only a small portion of Bluesky’s 16 million users (and counting). But fan communities are often what make a social network work; In the early 2010s, Tumblr flourished in part because of its fanbase for TV shows like “Supernatural” and “Doctor Who,” as well as bands like One Direction. Even if the community is small, these groups tend to be very active social media users, and Bluesky has so far prided itself on its ability to maintain highly engaged users.
“We have… a higher percentage of stickers than most social sites, which follows a 90-9-1 pattern of lurking pinned stickers. We haven’t dipped below nearly 30% of stickers,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote in message mail Tuesday.
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