Social network Bluesky is updating its app to allow anyone to share when they\u2019re livestreaming on Twitch, and adding specialized hashtags, known as cashtags, for discussing publicly traded stocks.<\/p>\n
The new features could potentially help Bluesky capitalize on a recent boost in new installs, which have arrived in the days after the X deepfake news went mainstream.<\/p>\n
On X, users were asking its integrated AI bot Grok to turn photos of real women and sometimes minors into sexualized images without consent. This week, California\u2019s attorney general\u00a0opened an investigation\u00a0into xAI\u2019s chatbot over the proliferation of the \u201cnonconsensual sexually explicit material.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the wake of the controversy, Bluesky saw its downloads surge in the U.S. According to new data from market intelligence provider Appfigures, daily downloads of Bluesky\u2019s iOS app have jumped nearly 50% from the period before news of the deepfakes reached critical mass.<\/p>\n The firm says Bluesky typically sees around 4,000 installs in the U.S. per day, but from December 30, 2025, through January 6, 2026, Bluesky\u2019s iOS downloads in the U.S. totaled around 19,500. From January 7, 2026, through January 14, downloads grew to 29,000 \u2014 a 49% increase.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, cashtags will allow the app to catch up to one of X\u2019s more popular use cases: discussing stocks. To create a cashtag, you place a dollar symbol before the stock ticker symbol (e.g., $AAPL for Apple).<\/p>\n The idea for cashtags was first introduced by stocks-focused social network Stocktwits, which now has over 10 million users, before the tags were later adopted by Twitter in 2012.<\/p>\n In addition, Bluesky says it\u2019s expanding access to the \u201cLive Now\u201d experimental feature that lets users add a temporary \u201cLIVE\u201d badge to their avatar to indicate when they\u2019re streaming online. Currently, this feature only supports Twitch and doesn\u2019t allow anyone to go live directly on Bluesky itself.<\/p>\n The boost in activity on Bluesky comes after the network saw declines in downloads and usage last year. In April 2025, Appfigures noted that the social networking startup\u2019s downloads dropped to new lows, and daily average users on mobile devices had declined nearly 40% by the end of October, per Similarweb data. Pew Research reported last year that a number of influencers now have Bluesky accounts, but they still tend to post more regularly on X.<\/p>\n This suggests that the switching costs are higher than some would expect when it comes to swapping out 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/bluesky-downloads-1.png?w=680\")