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Bluesky sees huge spike in new users as Elon Musk ruins blocking on X (Twitter)

More than one million people have joined Bluesky after X rolled out controversial changes that effectively render blocking useless

Bluesky has seen a massive influx of new users amid controversial changes on rival social media platform X (Twitter).

On Friday afternoon, Bluesky revealed that it has welcomed over 1.2 million new users in the past two days. This is markedly higher than the 500,000 new users it reported yesterday afternoon and 100,000 in the morning.

congratulations everyone, we have now passed 12 million people total on bluesky!!! 🦋

over 1.2M new people have joined bluesky in the last two days — welcome!! 💙🕺🪩

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— Bluesky (@bsky.app) October 18, 2024 at 1:42 PM

The swath of new Bluesky users coincides directly with X’s changes to its blocking policies. On Wednesday, the platform confirmed that blocked accounts will “soon” be able to view — but not engage with — the people who have blocked them. Naturally, there was a massive pushback to this, with the official X post on the news getting significantly ratioed.

Many people quickly pointed out that the whole reason to block someone is to prevent them from having any access to you, so allowing them to still see your activity ostensibly defeats the purpose of such a feature.

Elon Musk, the owner of X, has criticized the previous block feature and promised to make changes to it. Admittedly, it’s unsurprising that such a juvenile narcissist would take issue with people being able to block him or the many racist trolls he’s allowed back onto X. This is, after all, a man who admitted that he spent $44 billion USD (about $60.7 billion CAD) to acquire Twitter because he was upset that his daughter hates him.

But then, Musk is often blaming others for his own failings, like suing advertisers for leaving X after he helped make the platform more rife with hate speech and then telling companies to go “f*** themselves” for having the audacity to take issue with that.

On top of 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 you provide … for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” reads the updated TOS page. Per The Verge, this clause was only just added after October 9th, according to the Wayback Machine.

It remains to be seen how many more people will flock to Bluesky or other social media accounts amid X’s latest questionable moves.

Image credit: CBS

Via: The Verge

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