Bluesky hit peak usage for the year on election night | TechCrunch

In Brief

The blue wave swept Bluesky on Tuesday night as the microblogging platform recorded its highest daily number of posts, replies, and likes in 2026.

“We’re seeing a wave of new people joining and old friends coming back,” Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider posted.

According to Schneider, posts and likes doubled during the U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday.

COO Rose Wang told TechCrunch that usage began to peak between 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. PT, when many election results were rolling in. Daily posts and likes increased 30% and 70%, respectively, compared to the previous 30-day averages; clicks on links also spiked 20%.

According to open source data, Bluesky reached 44 million likes, 4.8 million posts, and 2 million new follows on November 4. This nearly eclipsed Bluesky’s all-time record 45 million likes in a single day, set in November 2024.

This jump was especially visible in Bluesky’s data traffic, which was 200% higher than usual, reaching up to 35.8 GB/s.

Bluesky is — sometimes snidely — referred to as “Twitter for the left,” given that its user base seems to skew that way politically. This isn’t a coincidence; Bluesky’s most concentrated period of user growth occurred after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, so it makes sense that those users would post actively during a night of overwhelming victories for the Democratic party.

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