In a post on its social network, Bluesky revealed that it gained 2 million new users last week, a huge growth in a short space of time for a platform that only has around 8.4 million users overall. The same post included a Portuguese translation of the announcement, presumably because the majority of the new users are from Brazil. As you may know, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes recently ordered the country’s internet service providers to block X after the website formerly known as Twitter refused to ban certain accounts that were allegedly spreading false information.
Moraes also ordered Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores and to impose fines of 50,000 reais (around $8,900) on anyone who uses a VPN to access the site. Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld the ban on X, with justices voting unanimously in favor of the measure, according to the BBC. X’s owner Elon Musk accused Moraes of subverting democracy “for political purposes.” The site also created a new profile, “Alexandre Files,” which it says will shed light on “Alexandre de Moraes’ abuse of Brazilian law.”
After X became inaccessible in Brazil, Brazilian users found new places to visit elsewhere. Bluesky saw a surge in the number of unique followers, as well as the number of unique daily likes and posts, during the last few days of August. The website is still not as robust as Twitter, but it recently teased that its next major app update will add video functionality, which could help retain new users.
Bluesky is a decentralized social network founded in 2019 by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The website started as an invite-only social network, but finally opened to the public earlier this year. It also introduced new features that most users who are deciding to leave X would want, including direct messaging. At launch, DMs only worked between two users, but the website promised to roll out group messaging, media support, and end-to-end encryption “in the future.” However, Dorsey stepped down from Bluesky’s board of directors in May, later claiming that the website was “literally repeating every mistake I made when I was running Twitter.”
