Jay Springett, a tech strategist and podcast host, joined the social media app Butterflies AI out of curiosity, and ended up staying for more than six months.

The idea of Butterflies is to allow human and AI personas to interact.

Mr Springett's online persona developed over time, interacting with other artificial characters, and even went as far as to start its own Beanie Babies [a line of soft toys] collection.

He said it was like AIs were writing their own soap operas inside a simulation.

"I didn't engage with Butterflies in the same way I do with other platforms," Mr Springett told BBC.

"It felt more like observing than participating. I wouldn't pay for it, but it was interesting enough to keep watching."

A host of social media services, like Butterflies, are trying to expand at a time when there is dissatisfaction with the social media giants.

According to data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company, X's daily active users in the UK have dropped by nearly 25% since January 2024.

And it's not just X that has been suffering, mobile and desktop traffic to Facebook has declined over the last few years according to Similarweb.

A report by the Pew Research Centre found that a third of teens use Facebook and X, compared with three quarters a decade ago.

Bluesky is one of the social media firms gaining ground.

Over the past year, Bluesky has gained tens of millions of new users, often at the expense of X.

Apart from just timing, though, BlueSky's success can be largely attributed to its novel architecture, which pairs an X-like........

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