Bluesky Sees Huge Surge in New Users as Elon Musk Breaks Block on X (Twitter)

Bluesky saw a massive influx of new users due to controversial changes on rival social media platform X (Twitter).

On Friday afternoon, Bluesky announced that it had welcomed over 1.2 million new users in the last two days. This is significantly higher than the 500,000 new users reported yesterday afternoon and 100,000 in the morning.

Congratulations everyone, we have now reached a total of 12 million people on Bluesky!!! 🦋

In the last two days over 1.2 million new people have registered with bluesky – welcome!! 💙🕺🪩

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– Bluesky (@bsky.app) October 18, 2024 at 1:42 pm

The flood of new Bluesky users directly coincides with changes to X’s blocking policies. On Wednesday, the platform confirmed that banned accounts will “soon” see the people they have blocked but will not be able to interact with them. Of course, there was massive resistance as the official X post was significantly overshadowed in the news.

We will soon be rolling out a change to how the block feature works.

If your posts are set to Public, the accounts you have blocked can see them, but they will not be able to interact with them (likes, replies, reposts, etc.).

— Engineering (@XEng) October 16, 2024

Many people were quick to point out that the only reason to block someone is to prevent them from doing so any have access to you, so continuing to allow them to see your activity defeats the purpose of such a feature.

The new Twitter blocking feature. pic.twitter.com/8UixRY1NFh

– Granite Man October 17, 2024

Elon Musk, the owner of X, has criticized the previous blocking feature and promised to make changes to it. Admittedly, it’s not surprising that such a teenage narcissist would have a problem with people attacking him or the many racist trolls he has on Twitter because he was upset that his daughter hates him.

Help! I (36F) blocked my ex (53M) on Twitter, but then he spent $44 billion renaming the entire site after himself so he could see my tweets again

– Katie Spalding (@supermathskid) October 16, 2024

On the other hand, Musk often blames others for his own mistakes, such as suing advertisers because they audacity to do something with it.

In addition to the block changes, X also recently changed its terms of service page to give itself leeway to use your data to train artificial intelligence models. “You agree that this license includes the right for us to analyze text and other information provided by you… for the use and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise,” the updated page reads the terms of use. Per The edgeAccording to the Wayback Machine, this clause was only added shortly after October 9th.

It remains to be seen how many more people will flock to Bluesky or other social media accounts in light of X’s recent questionable moves.

Photo credit: CBS

Via: The Verge