Elon Musk owned X, formerly, Twitter was recently banned in Brazil by the country’s Supreme Court. While the billionaire backed social media platform is now inaccessible in the South American nation, Bluesky has gained more than 2 million new users in the last 4 days.
According to a report by TechCrunch, Bluesky’s rapid growth caused some users to get the “Not Enough Resources” error message as the engineers ramped up the servers to handle the increased load.
Bluesky also became the most downloaded app in Brazil, positioning itself much ahead of Meta’s X competitor Threads. Appfigures, an app intelligence firm, claimed that Bluesky’s downloads has increased by a whopping 1,018,952 per cent.
Bluesky’s timeline and profile page might looks like a X replica to many. (Image Source: Google Play Store)
Why is Bluesky gaining so much traction in Brazil?
One of the main reasons why Brazilians may have flocked to Bluesky instead of Meta’s Threads is that its mobile app looks fairly similar to X (formerly Twitter), even featuring a timeline that looks like a replica of the now Elon Musk owned platform.
Another reason why former X users might be migrating to Bluesky is that unlike the former, whose ban might be tied to politics, Bluesky is much harder to shut down or controlled because of its decentralised structure.
To give you a quick recap, one of the major differences between Bluesky and X is that the latter is responsible for content moderation while users are in charge when it comes to content posted on Bluesky.
According to a Bluesky engineer, the number of likes on the platform increased to 106.4 million while the number of followers grew to 100.8 million.
To give you a quick recap, Bluesky is a social media network that originated under Jack Dorsey’s tenure as Twitter CEO back in 2019 aims to create an open and decentralised social media.
Similar to Mastodon’s ActivityPub, Bluesky wants users to be able to migrate from one Bluesky provider to another and give users more control over the type of content they see on their feed.
The decentralised nature of Bluesky combined with the familiar X like user interface seems to be the reason why Brazilians are signing up for the platform instead of Threads. While both apps lack certain features offered by X, Bluesky might feel more at home for former X users as they won’t have to learn to navigate from scratch on the fairly new platform.
