X is currently banned in Brazil following an order from a Supreme Court justice, and Brazilian users seem to be turning to Bluesky, an alternate social network, in droves.
“Brazil, you’re setting new all-time-highs for activity on Bluesky!” the official Bluesky account said in a post.
“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said. “We’ve never seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”
The Bluesky app looks and functions a lot like X, but it’s a decentralized social media platform that’s built on the AT Protocol (which is also developed by Bluesky). In a 5:12PM ET post, Frazee said that Bluesky is seeing 1,000 events per second — a “new milestone” — on its “relay,” which essentially functions as the firehose of data for the platform. On Friday night, Bluesky said it had 500,000 new users “in the last two days.”
Mastodon.social has been seeing “an uptick in sign-ups and overall traffic” from Brazil over the last 48 hours, Mastodon CEO and founder Eugen Rochko tells The Verge. “We used to get nearly 0 sign-ups from Brazil and now it’s up to 3.55k” on Saturday, Rochko says. He also notes that there could be additional growth on third-party servers, but because Mastodon is a decentralized social network, Mastodon (the company) doesn’t have visibility into that.
Meta, the corporation that runs Threads, which has links to the fediverse, hasn’t replied to a request for comment.
Looks like the HUEHUEHUEs have found a new containment social media.
