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, that Bluesky is seeing a jolt of Brazilian signups.
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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, that Bluesky is seeing a jolt of Brazilian signups.