Bluesky is booming since the election and this website shows you how fast it’s growing
Plus: Babe, wake up, new NBA City Edition just dropped
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at the simple website tracking how fast Bluesky is growing and my favorite NBA City Edition jerseys.
Scroll to the end to see: a poll that helps explain the 2024 election. 📊
Bluesky is booming since the election and this website shows you how fast it’s growing
The social network Bluesky has grown by millions of new users in the past two weeks as former X users have fled the Elon Musk-owned site for alternatives since the election. If that fact brings you happiness, you can watch Bluesky’s growth in real time in the most satisfying way possible.
Software engineer Natalie Bridgers called her Bluesky user counter website “a bit of a day project” when she posted a link on Bluesky last month when the site had more than 12 million users.
The site shows a counter ticking upwards one number at a time as users join at a rate of more than six new users per second as of Wednesday afternoon. More than two weeks since Election Day, and Bluesky has since grown to more than 20 million users.
“I used the ticker mainly because I thought it looked neat, but it also provided more visual feedback about the actual speed of how fast Bluesky is growing,” Bridgers tells me. She added the other data underneath the counter, showing the users-per-second growth rate and time until next update, “because I wanted more transparency about when updates happen and why the counter is going up at the speed it’s going up at.”
Interest in Bluesky comes as X users have noticed a marked difference in their feeds over the past several months. The X algorithm boosted posts from Musk and right-leaning accounts after Musk endorsed Donald Trump in July, a study from researchers at Queensland University of Technology found, and with Musk now set to play a role in Trump’s second term, a growing number of X users have decided to take their screen time elsewhere.
There are other Bluesky user counter sites too, like one Bridger was inspired by made by assistant professor and Bluesky user Theo Sanderson, proving there’s an audience eager to watch how fast the social network grows. Bridger’s site describes itself as an “almost-real-time Bluesky user count,” and a screenshot from Bridger’s site was shared by Polling USA, a popular social media polling aggregator.
Bridger joined Bluesky in May 2023 and says she was drawn to the site’s open API, decentralization, and “the community there because people are generally more forgiving and kind there” compared with X. If the site’s millions of new users feel the same way, Bluesky could soon find itself as a serious replacement for X users turned off by the site’s turn since Musk’s purchase and foray into politics.
Babe, wake up, new NBA City Edition just dropped
If there’s one lesson from this season’s NBA City Edition uniforms, which teams unveiled last week, it’s that retro-inspired contemporary designs are a safe bet for professional sports teams.
The league’s annual specialty City Edition jerseys can be hit-and-miss, but the best of the bunch were inspired by vintage designs. The Phoenix Suns took inspiration from their 1995 NBA All-Star uniform for their jersey and introduced a new “The Valley” logo in Western-style type inspired by the fonts used by the team in the 1970s and ‘80s. The Orlando Magic did something similar with the type on their jersey and they used the star icon from their 2001-2010 logo for the A in “Magic.”
The Los Angeles Clippers, whose recent rebrand I found overly complex, turned to artist and Clippers season ticket holder Jonas Wood to design jerseys in a new Pacific blue colorway inspired by the teams ‘80s uniforms.
Other teams with retro-inspired jerseys include the Philadelphia 76ers, whose jerseys pay homage to Spectrum arena where the team played from 1967-96, and the Toronto Raptors, who used their logo of a dunking velociraptor from the 2000 All-Star Dunk Contest.
The purple mountain “Utah” logo on the Utah Jazz jerseys is inspired by the team’s Stockton-Malone era logo, while the New York Knicks looked to their team’s jerseys of the late ‘90s and 2000s for design inspiration. The double stacked “New York New York” wordmark references the saying “the city so nice they named it twice.”
The Memphis Grizzlies paid homage to the Memphis Sounds, a pro basketball team that played in the now-defunct American Basketball Association, or ABA, from 1970 until 1975. That “Memphis” logo and lettering is lush.
You can see more of the NBA 2024-25 City Edition jerseys here. What are your favorites?
Have you seen this?
Democrats won “highly engaged” voters and struggled with everyone else in 2024. According to the final NBC News poll of the 2024 race, 76% of registered voters said they follow public affairs and politics closely. The poll showed Harris winning among that group by 5 points over Donald Trump, 52%-47%. But among the remaining quarter of voters who said they don’t follow politics closely, Trump was ahead by a much greater margin — 14 points, 54%-40%. [NBC News]
Trump's FCC pick, Brendan Carr, wrote Project 2025's chapter on the agency. Here's what he wants. Trump's pick to run the Federal Communications Commission will oversee the agency that regulates U.S. internet access and communications networks such as TV and radio. Carr believes it's an institution ripe for change, according to the chapter he wrote in Project 2025 about the FCC. [CBS News]
Jaguar’s controversial rebrand is bringing the car into the EV era. Jaguar’s bold rebrand is an amped-up version of a strategy that other companies, like Audi and General Motors, have used for new EV lines: moving away from recognizable brand touches to signal an entirely new, more tech-centric era. [Fast Company]
History of political design
“‘Buddy’ Cianci for Mayor” poster (1972). Though Cianci, the mayor of Providence, R.I., ran as an "anti-corruption candidate," he was indicted in 2001, found guilty by a jury of one count of racketeering conspiracy, and sentenced to more than five years in federal prison. In 1990, artist Shepard Fairey vandalized a Cianci campaign billboard with an image of André the Giant, which later became the basis of Fairey's Obey Giant.
A portion of this newsletter was first published in Fast Company.
Like what you see? Subscribe for more: