In a post on its own social network, BlueSky has revealed that it has added 2.6 million users in the last few days. This is a huge increase in such a short time, while the platform only has 8.8 million users in total. In a blog post, the company said that more than 85 percent of the new users are Brazilians, which is more than 2 million.
If you remember, Brazil’s 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 specific accounts accused of spreading misinformation.
Moraes also ordered Apple and Google to remove X from their app stores and imposed R$50,000 ($8,900) fines on people who use VPNs to access the website. According to the BBC, Brazil’s Supreme Court has upheld the ban on X after its judges voted unanimously in favor of the measure.
X owner Elon Musk accused Moraes of subverting democracy “for political purposes.” The website also created a new profile called “Alexander Files,” which it said would “shed light on the abuse of Brazilian law committed by Alexandre de Moraes.”
After X became unavailable in Brazil, the country’s users found new homes elsewhere. In late August, BlueSky saw a huge increase in the number of daily likes and posters, as well as an increase in the number of unique followers. Though the website isn’t as robust as Twitter yet, it recently teased that its next major app update would come with video features, which could help retain its new users.
A few other statistics about BlueSky’s rapidly growing popularity show the impact of this influx of people to the platform. Comparing the 96-hour period from August 30 to September 2 to the same period a month earlier, engineer Jazz said likes on the platform increased from 13 million to 104.6 million, followers increased from 1.4 million to 100.8 million, and reposts increased from 1.3 million to 11 million. BlueSky developer Paul Freese warned that users may see outages and performance issues as the platform has “never seen this kind of traffic.”
BlueSky is a decentralized social network that was first funded and founded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2019. The website launched as an invite-only social network, but it finally opened up to the public earlier this year. It also introduced several new features that most users look for when they’re ready to leave X, including direct messaging.
While DMs only worked between two users at launch, the website promised to roll out group messaging, media support and end-to-end encryption “down the line.” However, Dorsey exited the BlueSky board in May and later claimed the website was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter.
This story was updated after it was published. A portion of the original story speculating that the influx of users was possibly of Brazilian origin was replaced by a figure BlueSky published on Sept. 4 that confirmed this. At the same time, more details were added to the story on the growth of followers, likes and reposts on the platform.