The social network Bluesky updates its app in allow anyone to share when they stream live on Twitch and add niche hashtags, known as cashtagsfor discussion of publicly traded stocks.
The new features could potentially help Bluesky capitalize on the recent push in new installs, which arrived in the days after the Deepfake X news broke.
In X, users were asking the built-in AI bot Grok to turn photos of real women, and sometimes minors, into sexual images without their consent. This week, California’s attorney general opened an investigation on xAI’s chatbot for spreading “non-consensual sexual material”.
In the wake of the controversy, Bluesky saw its downloads rise in the U.S. According to new data from the market intelligence provider Appfiguresdaily downloads of Bluesky’s iOS app are up nearly 50% compared to the period before news of deepfakes reached critical mass.
The company says Bluesky typically sees about 4,000 US installs per day, but from December 30, 2025 to January 6, 2026, Bluesky’s iOS downloads in the US totaled about 19,500. From January 7, 2026 to January 14, downloads increased to 29,000 — a 49% increase.
Meanwhile, cashtags will allow the app to catch up to one of X’s most popular use cases: stock talk. To create a cashtag, you place a dollar sign before the stock symbol (eg $AAPL for Apple).
The concept of cashtags was first introduced by the stock-focused social network Stocktwits, which now has over 10 million users, before the tags were later adopted by Twitter in 2012.
In addition, Bluesky says it’s expanding access to its experimental “Live Now” feature that lets users add a temporary “LIVE” badge to their avatar to indicate when they’re streaming online. Currently, this feature only supports Twitch and does not allow anyone to go directly to Bluesky.
The boost in activity at Bluesky comes after the network fell in downloads and usage last year. In April 2025, Appfigures noted that the social media startup’s downloads it fell to new lows, and daily average users on mobile devices had down almost 40% by the end of October, according to Similarweb data. Pew Research reported last year that many influencers now have Bluesky accounts, but still tend to post more regularly on X.
This suggests that switching costs are higher than some might expect when it comes to trading 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.
