Isn't that the reason a lot of liberals went to Bluesky?
No, it's not. They left X because Elon Musk wouldn't ban people they disagreed with anymore.
But Bluesky's moderation teams were notorious for insta-banning people they disagreed with, and were then overwhelmed by the masses of lefties reporting each other for perceived ideological impurity.
Contemporary coverage and X discussions framed much of the overload as self-inflicted pile-ons within Bluesky’s heavily left-leaning user base.
Bluesky’s moderation team was overwhelmed by a massive surge in user reports during the post-2024 election growth spike—explicitly including cases of users reporting each other (or ideological opponents) for harassment, “misleading” content, or views that "violated the platform’s norms".
The official @safety .bsky.app account reported 42,000 moderation reports in a single 24-hour period (an all-time high) and ~3,000 reports per hour.
User reports jumped 17× to 6.48 million. This created Bluesky’s first-ever moderation backlog. The team quadrupled in size (from ~25 contracted moderators to roughly 100) and brought on external contractors.
Bluesky’s daily active users briefly rose to around 6 million before plunging to a low of 3.5 million by October 2025—a ~40% year-over-year drop.
Reports and data from 2025–2026 show a noticeable trend of users (especially journalists, media influencers, liberals, and creators) returning to X from Bluesky. Pew Research (May 2025) found most news influencers who tried Bluesky never fully left X; three-quarters of left-leaning ones and 87% of right-leaning ones stayed active on X (often more so). Many media figures who dramatically quit X for Bluesky returned by early 2025
Billionaire Mark Cuban (a Bluesky user) publicly stated in June 2025 that the platform's "lack of diversity of thought" had turned it into an echo chamber—ruder, more hateful, and forcing users (and posts) back to X.
A September 2025 New Yorker piece explicitly asked, "Why Are Liberals Returning to Elon Musk’s X?" noting many who fled to Bluesky were "creeping back" due to its "sectarian" culture, humor gap, and smaller reach—preferring X's bigger "megaphone" for attention and ideas.
In short, while not every Bluesky migrant returned (many use both or stuck around), enough did—driven by echo-chamber fatigue and X's superior reach—to make it a documented trend in 2025 coverage. X's dominance held steady.