Brazil’s X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

By wazup on August 30, 2024 Comments Closed / 49 views

Brazilian users seem to be turning to Bluesky in droves while they can’t use X.

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

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 says in a post.

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

The Bluesky app looks and functions a lot like X, but it’s a decentralized social media platform that’s built on the AT Protocol (which is also developed by Bluesky). In a 5:12PM ET post, Frazee says that Bluesky is seeing 1,000 events per second — a “new milestone” — on its “relay,” which essentially functions as the firehose of data for the platform.

Mastodon (another decentralized platform) and Meta (the corporation that runs Threads, which has links to the fediverse) didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment about whether they’re seeing increased usage as well.