By Kat Tenbarge and Kevin Collier

    On the day after the election, Nov. 6, X experienced its largest user exodus since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. And now, users are flooding to alternative text-based social media apps like Bluesky and Instagram’s Threads.

    Those numbers appear to be climbing, as users and brands like The Guardian and Don Lemon continue to announce their departures from the platform.

    NBC News spoke to six people who have joined or committed to using Threads and Bluesky in place of X after the election because of Musk. Each of them cited growing issues on X, including bots, partisan advertisements and harassment, which they all felt reached a tipping point when Donald Trump was elected president last week with Musk’s support. Musk has since joined Trump on calls and in meetings to weigh in on his transition to president.

    For Kara Wurtz, a 39-year-old finance director in St. Louis, the day after the election was the “final straw.” After using Twitter for “a good eight years,” Wurtz said under Musk’s leadership, the platform, renamed X, “became a place where I wasn’t really getting what I wanted out of it anymore.”

    “Every time I opened it up, it would throw things at me that put me in a bad mood,” she told NBC News. “I noticed Tuesday night into Wednesday I started to see a lot more anti-woman stuff. And I was like, ‘You know what? That’s personal. I’m done.’”

    Wurtz, who said she mainly used X for local news, politics and entertainment, has now switched to Threads, where she initially created an account when it launched last year. But her local St. Louis community wasn’t there yet. In the past five days, Wurtz said people she used to follow on X have started to trickle over to Threads.

    Wurtz isn’t alone. More than 1 million people joined Bluesky in the past week, the platform said, bringing its user base to over 15 million people, while head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced Nov. 3 that Threads had surpassed 275 million monthly active users.

    A spokesperson for X declined to provide numbers for how many people have left the platform recently, but pointed to metrics the site announced last week that the company saw 942 million posts, an all-time high.

    David Carr, the editor of news insights and research at Similarweb, provided NBC News with data that confirmed that during the presidential election, X got the most traffic it has all year. But the day after, Nov. 6, X also saw 115,414 account deactivations, the most it has gotten since Musk took ownership of the site, the research found.

    Noëlle Polo, a 22-year-old Texan, joined Bluesky the night after the election. When she woke up the morning after she joined Bluesky, she said, “all of the Swifties joined.” Polo is one of thousands of people who run fan accounts about Taylor Swift, forming one of the largest fandoms. On Nov. 6, a notable exodus of the Swifties from X landed on Bluesky, which Polo prefers to Threads because it isn’t connected to her Instagram account.

    “I have a private personal account for friends and family and a public account for Taylor Swift, so nobody drowns in my Taylor Swift content,” Polo said. “Swifties have been looking for another app besides Twitter ever since Elon took over. It just wasn’t a healthy environment.”

    Rory Mir, an associate director of community organizing at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that “X is really teaching everyone the importance of who owns the sites that we use and rely on to communicate online.”

    “What people are seeing with X is that it has subjectively deteriorated in value,” Mir continued. “People don’t feel like the right boxes are being heard or promoted on the site. They don’t feel safe using the site in many cases.”

    For other X users who used the platform to build an audience and find a community, the decision of whether to stop posting or delete their account isn’t an easy one.