Social media is famously hard to quit. One of the technology sector’s hottest start-ups thinks it has a solution. Bluesky, a near facsimile of Elon Musk’s X, has set out to build a social networking site where letting users defect to rivals isn’t just a risk — it’s the point.

Bluesky started as a project within then-Twitter, until it was spun out in 2022. That heritage shows, from the blue logo to the feel of its digital shopfront. Many of its 25mn users — a number that has nearly doubled since November’s US election — have joined to distance themselves from Musk, whose ownership of X is now one of its defining features.

The premise of Bluesky, though, is different from its progenitor’s. It was created to be a decentralised social network, where users’ posts and connections aren’t governed by a single company but are instead dispersed around the internet. The servers and apps that share Bluesky’s common protocols are collectively labelled “the atmosphere”. Whereas X builds a wall around its users’ accounts and data, Bluesky does not.