Bluesky Brazilian “Twitter Refugee” Count Reaches Over 2.5 Million
Bluesky has witnessed remarkable growth, adding 2.6 million new users in just a few days following Brazil’s ban of X last week. This influx represents a significant expansion for the platform, which previously had around 8.8 million users. Notably, over 85% of these new users are Brazilian, translating to more than 2 million individuals from Brazil alone.
This user boom follows a dramatic turn of events involving Elon Musk’s X. To recap, Brazil’s Supreme Court, led by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, mandated the blocking of X due to its failure to remove accounts promoting misinformation. Additionally, Apple and Google were instructed to remove X from their app stores, and users accessing the site via VPN faced substantial fines. The court’s decision, upheld unanimously, has fueled a backlash from X, which accused the ruling of undermining democracy and spotlighted Moraes through a new profile.
With X rendered inaccessible in Brazil, Bluesky capitalized on the opportunity. The platform saw a meteoric rise in engagement metrics: likes surged from 13 million to over 104 million, follows skyrocketed from 1.4 million to 100.8 million, and reposts leaped from 1.3 million to 11 million over a recent 96-hour period.
Bluesky, a decentralized social network founded by Jack Dorsey until his recent departed from the company, had been operating as an invite-only platform until its recent public launch. Despite some anticipated performance issues due to the sudden surge in traffic, the platform’s rapid expansion comes as a clear reaction to both the banning of X and the many changes it has undergone since Musk acquired the platform.