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!! 💙🕺🪩
— 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.
Soon we’ll be launching a change to how the block function works.
If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).
— Engineering (@XEng) October 16, 2024
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.
The new Twitter block function. pic.twitter.com/8UixRY1NFh
— Granite Man 🏴 (@GraniteDhuine) October 17, 2024
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.
Help! I (36F) blocked my ex (53M) on twitter but then he spent $44 billion and renamed the entire website after himself so he could see my tweets again
— katie spalding (@supermathskid) October 16, 2024
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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