Photo source: NBC News
Brazil’s recent ban of Elon Musk’s social media platform X has significantly increased the visibility of its smaller competitor, Bluesky, as users seek alternatives to express their views.
Bluesky announced that it gained two million new users within just one week.
However, the app faced some challenges on Wednesday, with numerous users reporting outages. “There will almost certainly be some outages and performance issues,” stated Bluesky developer Paul Frazee.
“We’ve never seen traffic like this. Hang with us!” he added.
Last week, the company noted that Brazilian users were achieving unprecedented levels of activity on the platform. This surge in traffic follows a ruling from Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes who ordered a nationwide suspension of X. A Supreme Court panel then upheld this decision last Monday.
Before the ban, X indicated it would not comply with court orders in Brazil regarding its content moderation policies and a request to appoint a new legal representative in the country.
Judge de Moraes has also imposed daily fines on individuals or businesses in Brazil that use virtual private networks or other means to access X while it remains banned. X is estimated to have over 22 million users in Brazil.
As of Wednesday, Bluesky had risen to the top of Brazil’s iOS App Store as the leading free app, followed closely by Threads, an alternative to X developed by Meta Platforms, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. “We’re so back,” the official Threads account posted on Wednesday without providing further context.
Competing for the Top Spot
Bluesky was first introduced in 2019 as a project to create an open, decentralised social protocol, backed by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, which has since been rebranded as X after Musk’s acquisition. Bluesky became an independent company in 2021, and Dorsey severed his ties with the platform earlier this year.
Bluesky, Threads, and the open-source decentralised network Mastodon are competing to dethrone X as the leading microblogging platform.
Amid controversies surrounding Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover in 2022 and subsequent changes, these companies have seen a surge in user numbers.
Bluesky’s registrations from the U.K. reportedly spiked last month, coinciding with Musk’s controversial comments about nationwide riots in the country.
Despite reports of advertisers and some users fleeing X, none of the alternatives have emerged as a significant threat to X. Threads appears to be the closest contender, boasting over 200 million monthly active users, according to a post by Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, in August. In May, Musk stated that X had reached 600 million monthly active users and around 300 million daily active users.
