Elon Musk apparently took a break from training for his next battle royale with Mark Zuckerberg doing an incredibly unpopular new thing on Twitter this weekend. In a fit of inspired stupidity, Musk tweeted a new edict on Saturday: from now on, anyone who does not pay for Twitter will only be able to read a number of tweets per day. The following uproar users of the platform would have encouraged some of them to take refuge elsewhere, in particular on the competing site of Twitter, Bluesky.
bluesky social is the new pet project of former Twitter messiah Jack Dorsey. The platform is similar to Twitter in many ways, except it was built around a decentralized protocol, which proponents say could release the platform of some of the controversies and complications of Dorsey’s old platform.
CNBC reports that Bluesky saw “record traffic” this weekend amid Musk’s announcement of new tweet limits. The media reports that:
… people have turned to Bluesky, an emerging text-based social media site … Bluesky is still in an invite-only beta phase, and the company said in a post Saturday that its systems are experiencing ” degraded performance while due to record traffic.The platform also had to temporarily suspend registrations to address performance issues.
Bluesky is currently “by invitation only”, which means that to get an account, you you have to be invited by a current Bluesky user, who will send you a code which can then be used to create an account. With that in mind, Bluesky’s “record traffic” over the weekend may have been a sign of a surge of new accounts being activated or could have been a sign that new users who had already created accounts were using Bluesky. more than ever. It’s not entirely clear. Gizmodo contacted Bluesky for more details.
Twitter has been on a downward spiral of epic proportions since Musk took over it late last year. Some critics think so could finally be grilled. However, alternative platforms (such as decentralized sites Mastodon And Nostr) have so far posed no real threat to Twitter’s status as the king of microblogging.
Bluesky may (one day) change that. So far, however, it remains a platform with a small user base and big, big dreams. Currently, the social network claims around 50,000 users. The protocol on which it is built is still under development, with the company say that it is “almost done”.
