It was meant to be.Prophecy ForetoldTwitter alternative Bluesky has skyrocketed in popularity ever since Donald Trump was reelected as US president earlier this month. Over the last week alone, its user base doubled to 15 million users,then blew past 19.5 million.The small team behind the operation is racing to keep up with the serious influx."We as a team take pride in our ability to scale quickly," CEO Jay Graber told the New York Times in an interview. "But theres always some growing pains."Interestingly, Graber was practically destined for the job. Her mother, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and moved to the United States in the 1980s, named her "Lantian" in Mandarin which literally translates to "blue sky."Bluer SkiesIn a Forbes profile last year, Graber recalled that her mother called her Lantian "because she wanted me to have boundless freedom. The opportunities she didn't have."The 33-year-old tech exec was already part of Bluesky's developer team when Parag Agrawal, who would go on to become the CEO of Twitter before getting fired by new owner Elon Musk, offered her the opportunity to lead the microblogging platform in 2021.The company, however, wasn't named after Graber. Bluesky founder Jack Dorsey, who also started Twitter, originally came up with the moniker in 2019,two years before Graber came on board.The social media landscape has gone through some tremendous changes since Graber took over the reins. Perhaps the biggest wildcard came when mercurial businessman Elon Musk acquired Twitter for a whopping $44 billion, quickly turning it into a largely unrecognizable echo chamber of hate speech and disinformation.Especially now that Musk has thrown his full weight behind president-elect Donald Trump, an unprecedented number of users are looking for new stomping grounds, including Bluesky.The exodus hit its peak the day after the presidential election, with more than 116,000 people deactivating their X accounts in the US, setting a new record.Meanwhile, Bluesky feels more vibrant than ever before.For her part, Graber has prioritized coming up with new features that actually further the interest of average users, like sorting new content using custom algorithms a far cry from X, where Musk has instructed staff to prioritize his own tweets and conservative content.Even when it comes to generative AI, Bluesky appears to be putting the interest of users first, with the company promising on Friday that it wouldn't leverage users' content to train large language models. That's a stark contrast to X, which went behind users' backs to reserve the right to use their tweets to train AI models whether they opt out or not."The state of most social platforms right now is that users are locked in and developers are locked out," Graber told the NYT. "We want to build something that makes sure users have the freedom to move and developers have the freedom to build."Share This Article