• by Colin Kirkland , September 3, 2024

Elon Musk and his social media platform X continue to benefit Bluesky’s user base, which has been seeing “all-time-highs for activity” -- adding well over 2 million new users in the past four days.

The decentralized microblogging app, which fully opened to the public in February, has reported a major surge in signups since Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes threatened to ban competitor app X in the region if Musk did not name a legal representative for the platform by Thursday night.

Because Musk refused to comply with Moraes' orders, the Brazilian Supreme Court officially banned X. By Friday, Bluesky was reporting “all-time-highs for activity” with 500,000 new users joining.

The social platform has since added almost 2 million more users and has landed the top spot on the free iPhone app chart in Brazil, surpassing another decentralized competitor, Meta’s Threads. App intelligence firm Appfigures shows Bluesky’s total downloads soaring by 10,584% over the weekend compared to the previous weekend, with downloads in Brazil up by over 1 million percent.

In response to Bluesky's sudden popularity in Brazil and the recent court ruling, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote: “good job Brazil, you made the right choice.”

On Tuesday, the company told TechCrunch that the number of new users since Friday continues to grow “by the minute.”

Despite the obvious cause-and-effect of X’s departure from Brazil -- its biggest user base in Latin America, which cut off over 20 million users in the region -- Bluesky has seen downloads rise by 584% in 22 other countries as well, especially in Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania.

According to a Bluesky engineer, this sudden boost in user growth has resulted in heightened engagement. In the past four days, the platform has seen likes increase from 13 million (the same time a week prior) to 104.6 million, while follows increased from 1.4 million to 100.8 million and reposts grew from 1.3 million 11 million.

Like Meta's Threads app, decentralized social media platform Bluesky – launched as a direct competitor to X – is providing X users with another potentially less volatile space to commune after Musk slashed the majority of X's content-moderation team in 2022.

And this is not the first time Musk's actions have led to a boost in users for Bluesky.

Last month, during nationwide riots in the U.K. following the fatal stabbing of three young girls wrongly blamed on a Muslim immigrant, Musk incited resistance and spread misinformation on X in relation to the ongoing unrest. Bluesky then saw a 60% increase in activity from accounts in the U.K., with members of parliament joining the platform as well.

“For five out of the last seven days, the U.K. had the most Bluesky signups of any country,” Bluesky said at the time.

Bluesky officially went public last July, and has since amassed almost 700 thousand monthly active users, according to data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb, and continues to grow and expand from the vision of ex-Twitter head Jack Dorsey, who started the app.

While Dorsey recently left Bluesky, the company recently hired former Twitter trust and safety leader Aaron Rodericks, who was fired from Twitter after Musk cut half of the Election Integrity team.

Rodericks, now in charge of Bluesky’s round-the-clock content-moderation efforts, says “there is an urgent global need for a social network that can safely and effectively meet the needs of communities and individuals.”

As the app continues to grow alongside other competitors like Threads and Mastodon, and the U.S. presidential election looms, Bluesky may attract a larger swath of users in reaction to Musk and the proliferation of right-wing politics on X.