The social network Bluesky is updating its app to allow anyone to share when they are live-streaming on Twitch. It is also adding specialized hashtags, known as cashtags, for discussing publicly traded stocks.
These new features could potentially help Bluesky capitalize on a recent boost in new installs. This surge arrived in the days after news went mainstream about non-consensual AI-generated images on X. On that platform, users were asking its integrated AI bot Grok to turn photos of real women and sometimes minors into sexualized images without their consent. This week, California’s attorney general opened an investigation into xAI’s chatbot over the proliferation of this nonconsensual sexually explicit material.
In the wake of that controversy, Bluesky saw its downloads surge in the United States. According to new data from market intelligence provider Appfigures, daily downloads of Bluesky’s iOS app have jumped nearly fifty percent from the period before news of the deepfakes reached critical mass. The firm says Bluesky typically sees around four thousand installs in the U.S. per day. However, from December thirtieth, 2025, through January sixth, 2026, Bluesky’s iOS downloads in the U.S. totaled around nineteen thousand five hundred. From January seventh through January fourteenth, downloads grew to twenty-nine thousand, representing a forty-nine percent increase.
Meanwhile, cashtags will allow the app to catch up to one of X’s more popular use cases: discussing stocks. To create a cashtag, you place a dollar symbol before the stock ticker symbol, such as AAPL for Apple. The idea for cashtags was first introduced by the stocks-focused social network Stocktwits, which now has over ten million users, before the tags were later adopted by Twitter in 2012.
In addition, Bluesky says it is expanding access to an experimental feature called “Live Now.” This lets users add a temporary “LIVE” badge to their avatar to indicate when they are streaming online. Currently, this feature only supports Twitch and does not allow anyone to go live directly on Bluesky itself.
This boost in activity on Bluesky comes after the network saw declines in downloads and usage last year. In April 2025, Appfigures noted that the social networking startup’s downloads had dropped to new lows. Furthermore, daily average users on mobile devices had declined nearly forty percent by the end of October, according to Similarweb data. Pew Research reported last year that a number of influencers now have Bluesky accounts, but they still tend to post more regularly on X.
This suggests that the switching costs are higher than some would expect when it comes to swapping one real-time social network for another. Adding new features will only be part of the battle for Bluesky; it will also have to find a way to get users to change years of ingrained behavior.