Social networking startup Bluesky continues to reap the benefits of X’s outage in Brazil, adding more than 2 million new users in the past four days—up from 500,000 as of Friday. The rapid growth has left some users occasionally experiencing “not enough resources” errors to handle requests, and Bluesky engineers have struggled to keep their servers stable as the influx of new signups continues.
As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to the No. 1 app in Brazil over the weekend, surpassing Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads surged 10,584% over the past week, with Brazil seeing a whopping 1,018,952% growth. The company notes that the growth appears to be having a halo effect, with downloads outside of Brazil also up 584%, in part because Bluesky has now picked up downloads in 22 countries where it previously received little attention.
In terms of absolute downloads, the countries with the most installs outside of Brazil were the United States, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Spain. However, the countries with the most download growth were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Romania. Most of the latter group jumped from single-digit growth to thousands.
Blue Sky's new entrants also actively participated in the platform, which also led to an increase in other key indicators.
As one Blue Sky engineer put it, likes on social networks have grown to 104.6 million in the past four days, compared to just 13 million in the same period a week ago. Follows have also grown from 1.4 million to 108 million, and reposts have grown from 1.3 million to 11 million.
As of Monday, Bluesky said it had added 2.11 million users in the past four days, up from 26,000 users it added over the previous week. The company also said it had seen a “significant increase of over 100% in daily active users.”
The appeal of Bluesky to those who had to leave X may have to do with how similar the user experience is to the Elon Musk-owned app formerly known as Twitter. Bluesky, which was spun off as a separate company and funded itself, still retains much of the look and feel of Twitter.
Like X, Bluesky offers features like likes, reposts, quote posts, lists, direct messages, a search tool, and user profiles, but it also improves on X in other ways. As a decentralized social network, users can set up their own instance (a server that runs Bluesky and connects with others over the AT protocol), customize their feed, subscribe to third-party moderation services, and create and share “starter packs” that link to a curated set of recommended users. Bluesky says it plans to add support for video in an upcoming update.
Another factor to consider here is how Bluesky's approach to content and review differs from Threads.
Even back when it was Twitter, X was long known as a hotbed of breaking news and political debate, but Threads is taking the opposite approach, saying it won’t be recommending political content by default on its platform. Instead, Threads wants to be more Instagram-like and be embraced by brands and influencers, with the ultimate goal of monetizing through advertising.
Given that the ban of X in Brazil was politically motivated (Brazil wanted control over what could be said on the platform), it’s likely that some Brazilians who chose Bluesky wanted to join a network that was less centralized and easier to control. While platforms like X leave moderation decisions up to the site owners, decentralized networks put the responsibility in the hands of their users.
That flexibility, combined with Bluesky's ease of use, could make this network more appealing than others.
For example, Mastodon offers its own decentralized network, but its recent user growth, led by Brazil, has been much smaller. On Saturday, Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko said the service had 4,200 signups in Brazil, up from 152 on Aug. 28, for example. That could be a sign that Brazilians want more than decentralization. They also want a place more like Twitter/X.
Meta hasn’t commented yet on how much of a spike in threads was due to Brazilians leaving X, but for a network that already boasts over 200 million monthly active users, adding a few thousand or a few million more probably wouldn’t be a significant gain over the much smaller Bluesky. Still, it’s possible that Brazilians wanted to move away from their friends, family, and creators, to a place where they could basically post public posts and where things once felt more like Twitter. Bluesky’s culture, with its poop posts and meme-friendly rants, has the chaotic energy of early Twitter.
X is said to have over 20 million users in Brazil alone, which means there is huge potential for growth across the app.
