Bluesky was launched as a Twitter rival — but it's far less popular. Now it's eyeing Reddit for inspiration

The BlueSky logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen with its icon in back of it.

Bluesky, the social media platform that originated within Twitter, rose to prominence as a rival to the network after Elon Musk acquired the company and rebranded it as X.

But, two years since its launch, the site has around just 10% of X's estimated global users. Bluesky's Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told CNBC that the site saw its future not in rivalling X, but in taking inspiration from the online community forum Reddit .

"The world is changing rapidly, and we're not trying to build what social used to be and get to parity," Wang told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday.

Wang said that Bluesky would move away from the "public square" style of feed of X or Threads, and will instead be "useful" as a discovery mechanism.

"What we've learned through this process is that I think the public square is not the direction we want to go in. Essentially, I think it's useful as a discovery mechanism, but we're very inspired by companies like Reddit." she said.

"A public square, where there's only a stage, and there's posters, like people on a stage and people who are watching, that is not social... we're in the medieval stages of the online world."

Reddit launched in 2011 and billed itself as "the front page of the internet," offering "sub-Reddits" on a huge range of topics. It went public in 2024 and trades at around $170 a share.