Social networking startup Bluesky continues to benefit from X's shutdown in Brazil, adding more than 2 million new users in the past four days, up from just 500,000 as of Friday. The rapid growth has led some users to occasionally encounter “insufficient resources” errors to process requests, and Bluesky engineers have scrambled to keep servers stable as the influx of new signups hit.
As new users download the app, Bluesky leapfrogged Meta's X rival Instagram Threads over the weekend to become the No. 1 app in Brazil. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, total downloads of Bluesky increased 10,584% over last weekend, with downloads in Brazil up a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth appears to have had a halo effect, as the company noted that downloads outside Brazil also increased 584%, in part because Bluesky was downloaded in 22 countries where it had previously had little penetration.
Outside of Brazil, the countries with the most installs in terms of absolute downloads were the US, Portugal, the UK, Canada and Spain, while the countries with the highest percentage increases in downloads were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania, with most of the latter group seeing increases that went from single digits to thousands.
Bluesky's new entrants have also been active on the platform, boosting other key metrics.
As one of Bluesky's engineers noted, the number of “likes” on the social network has increased to 104.6 million in the past four days, up from 13 million in the same period just a week ago, while follows have also increased from 1.4 million to 108 million, and reposts have increased from 1.3 million to 11 million.
As of Monday, Blue Sky said it had added 2.11 million users in the past four days, up from 26,000 a week earlier. The company further stated that it had “significantly increased its user base by 100%.” [daily active users] increase.”
Bluesky's appeal to people forced to leave X may be because its user experience is so similar to the app formerly known as Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk. Once incubated within Twitter, Bluesky has spun off as a separate company, with its own funding, but it has retained much of Twitter's look and feel.
Like X, Bluesky offers features such as likes, reposts, quote posts, lists, direct messages, a search tool, and user profiles, but improves on X's capabilities in other ways. As a decentralized social network, users can set up their own instances (servers that run Bluesky and connect to other users via the AT protocol), customize their feeds, sign up for third-party moderation services, and create and share “starter packs” that link to a curated set of recommended users to follow. Bluesky also plans to add support for video in a future update, the company said.
Another factor to consider here is how Bluesky's approach to content and moderation differs from Threads.
Since the days of Twitter, X has long been known as a hotbed of breaking news and political debate, but Threads is taking the opposite approach, saying it won't default to promoting political content on the platform. Instead, Threads aims to be a platform embraced by brands and influencers, similar to Instagram, and plans to eventually monetize it with ads.
Given that the ban of X in Brazil was tied to political reasons (the country wanted to moderate what was said on the platform), some Brazilians who chose Bluesky may have wanted to join a network that was less centralized and easier to manage: on a platform like X, moderation decisions are left to the site owners, whereas in a decentralized network, users are in control.
This flexibility, combined with Bluesky's ease of use, will give the network greater appeal than other networks.
Mastodon, for example, offers its own decentralized network, but its recent user growth, driven by Brazil, has been much smaller. On Saturday, Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko said the service saw 4,200 Brazilian sign-ups, up from 152 on Aug. 28. That may tell us that Brazilians want more than just decentralization: They also want something more like Twitter/X.
Meta hasn't commented yet on the extent to which threads have grown as a result of Brazilians leaving X, but for a network that already has more than 200 million monthly active users, adding thousands or even millions more likely won't be a noticeable boost compared to the much smaller Bluesky. Still, it's possible that Brazilians wanted to move away from friends, family, and creators to a place where posting is public by default and has a feel more like old Twitter, where the culture tends toward raunchy posts and memes and has the chaotic energy of early Twitter.
X reportedly has over 20 million users in Brazil, meaning there's plenty of room for growth on all fronts.