Bluesky social network app update for allow anyone to share while livestreaming on Twitch, and adding custom hashtags, known as cashtagsto discuss common stock.
The new features have the potential to help Bluesky expand its new installations, which have arrived a few days after X fake news become mainstream.
In X, users ask Grok’s integrated AI bot to turn photos of real women and sometimes children into sexual images without their consent. This week, California’s attorney general open an investigation to chatbot xAI about the proliferation of “nonconsensual sexually explicit material.”
After the controversy, Bluesky saw its downloads increase in the US According to new data from the market intelligence provider AppfiguresDaily downloads from Bluesky’s iOS app have jumped nearly 50% from the period before the news of deepfakes reached critical mass.
The company said Bluesky typically sees around 4,000 installs in the US per day, but from December 30, 2025, to January 6, 2026, Bluesky iOS downloads in the US totaled around 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: discussing stocks. To create a cashtag, you must place the dollar symbol before the stock ticker symbol (for example, $AAPL for Apple).
The idea for cashtags was first introduced by the stock-focused social network Stocktwits, which currently has more than 10 million users, before the tag was later adopted by Twitter in 2012.
In addition, Bluesky said it is expanding access to an experimental “Live Now” feature that allows users to add a temporary “LIVE” badge to their avatar to show when they’re streaming online. Currently, this feature only supports Twitch and does not allow anyone to go live on Bluesky itself.
The increase in activity on Bluesky comes after the network saw a decrease in downloads and usage last year. In April 2025, Appfigures noted that the initial download of the social network fall for less new, and average daily users on mobile devices already down almost 40% at the end of October, according to Similarweb data. Pew Research reported last year Although some influencers now have Bluesky accounts, they still tend to post more regularly on X.
This suggests that switching costs are higher than expected when switching from one real-time social network to another. Adding new features will only be part of the battle for Bluesky; it must also find a way to get users to change their ingrained behavior.