Social media platform Bluesky attracts millions in Brazil after judge bans Musk’s X

Brazil’s recent ban of Elon Musk’s social media platform X has boosted the profile of its smaller rival, Bluesky, as people search for alternatives to voice their opinions.

Bluesky said in a post that it had attracted two million new users in a span of a week, and the app appeared to be experiencing some problems on Wednesday, with several users reporting an outage.

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

On Saturday, the company also said that users from Brazil were setting new all-time highs for activity.

The reported uptick in the platform’s traffic comes after a Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered a nationwide suspension of the X platform on Friday. A Supreme Court panel affirmed the ruling on Monday. 

Predating the ban, X indicated it would not comply with court orders in Brazil concerning its content moderation policies and a request to appoint a new legal representative in the country.

The judge, Alexandre de Moraes, has also ordered daily fines for people or businesses in Brazil that use virtual private networks (VPNs) or other methods to access X while it’s banned, according to local media. 

X is estimated to have over 22 million users in Brazil. 

As of Wednesday, Bluesky was the top free app on Brazil’s iOS App Store, followed by Threads — an X-alternative by Meta Platforms which also own Facebook and Instagram. 

“We’re so back,” the official Threads account posted on Wednesday without providing further context. 

Bluesky was first announced in 2019 as a project to build an open, decentralized social protocol, backed by Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter — which was rebranded as X after Musk bought it. Bluesky became an independent company in 2021. Dorsey cut ties with the platform earlier this year.

Bluesky, Threads and the open-source, decentralized network Mastodon, have been competing to unseat X as the top microblogging platform.

Amid controversies surrounding Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover in 2022 and his subsequent changes to the platform, these companies have experienced a jump in their users.

Bluesky’s sign-ups from the U.K. had reportedly surged last month, while Musk had been posting controversial comments about nationwide riots in the country.

However, despite reports of advertisers and some users fleeing X, none of the alternatives have emerged as a credible threat to X. 

Threads appears to be the closest, with over 200 million monthly active users, according to a post on Threads by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in August.

In May, Musk said in a post that X had reached 600 million monthly active users and around 300 million daily active users.