As Bad Bunny says, “baby, life’s a cycle.” Things always repeat themselves, and when we talk about Elon Musk and Twitter/X, the pattern is always, always, always the same: Elon Musk plays something he doesn’t have to play, forgets (partially) about Bluesky, returns to X, and so on . And as for the event that concerns us today… it was no less.

What happened. Of course not, Elon Musk decided to block users that we do not want to see or appear on the platform. Why? Therefore, from now on, blocking a user on X will not prevent him from seeing our posts. Posts that are public will be visible to everyone, whether they are blocked or not. You won’t be able to interact, but you will be able to see what we publish.

X hides that this blocking function can be used to “publish harmful content or private information about blocked individuals” without their knowledge. “With this update, users will be able to see if this behavior is occurring, allowing for greater transparency,” says X on their official profile.

The trade-off, which is completely ignored by X, is that the blocking function also serves to keep the platform’s trolls away from our profile. Or before we go any further, to avoid having to see false content, hoaxes, scams, hate messages and other posts in our feed that the verified paid person will correct.

Conclusion? Some users have decided to escape X in search of greener pastures, and Bluesky, along with Threads, is the friendliest platform in this regard. As confirmed by the official Bluesky account on his profile… Bluesky apparently had half a million users registered on its platform in the last day alone. In just 12 hours, 100,000 people signed up, and by the end of the day the number had risen to half a million.

A significant increase in registrations is expected in Threads, but the platform did not provide data on this subject.

This pattern repeats all the time. Because this is normal. At the end of the day, every decision Elon Musk makes while managing data to train artificial intelligence is, in short, details.

When the Brazilian judiciary ordered X to be shut down just a month ago, Bluesky gained three million new users in just one week. The number of downloads of the application increased by 1,018.9% in four days. Shortly after, the platform announced that it had managed to reach ten million registered users. The nuance here is that registered users are not the same as monthly or daily unique users.

Bluesky Statistics. Likes in blue, posts in red and daily follows in green | Capture: Xataka

The same thing happened in September last year when Elon Muk announced that new accounts would have to pay a small amount to create an account. The user Jaz has a website that analyzes the state and development of the social network through the Bluesky API and can see how it looks in September (paid X), February (opening of Bluesky), September (blocking X in Brazil). and October (blocking feature changes) saw large increases in activity resulting from an increase in the number of users. Mastodon has similar peaks.

But it’s not easy. Because X continues to make up the majority of “Twitter-type” social networks, with 300 to 400 million monthly active users. It’s followed by Threads, which has over 175 million users (and owes its success in part to its great integration with Instagram). At the bottom of the table is Bluesky, which has 11.8 million registered users, and finally Mastodon, which has 9.8 million registered users and one million daily active users.

Cover image | Xataka

in Xataka | Elon Musk wants to make X a defender of free speech and sue anyone who opposes him