Brazil’s X Ban Is Sending Lots of People to Bluesky

Jay Peters, The Verge:

X is currently banned in Brazil following an order from a Supreme Court justice, and Brazilian users seem to be turning to Bluesky, an alternate social network, in droves.

“Brazil, you’re setting new all-time-highs for activity on Bluesky!” the official Bluesky account said in a post.

“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said. “We’ve never seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”

Back in May 2023, I made a bold prediction that hasn’t panned out:

Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy to understand.

That prediction might have proven wrong anyway, but the event I didn’t foresee at the time was Meta’s Threads (which launched last July). Threads is thriving, and by some measures, for some communities, has overtaken X as the preeminent Twitter-like social network. But, for better (in some ways) and worse (in others), Threads is quite different from the Twitter of yore.

What’s great about Bluesky is that of today’s four major Twitter-like platforms — X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky — it’s the one that’s closest in spirit to old Twitter. Yet, personally, it gets the least of my attention of the four. Still rooting for Bluesky, though, and I’m not surprised at all that, faced with a sudden shutdown of X, Bluesky is seeing a jolt of Brazilian signups.

★ Tuesday, 3 September 2024