In the tech world, a person's mistake is another's gain. People will flock to an alternative when they feel like the service is no longer up to their standards, and that might be what's happening with Bluesky as Twitter sets limits that didn't use to exist.
Bluesky is Thriving
Bluesky is already a probable alternative considering who backs it. It is a project by Jack Dorsey, who was one of the co-founders of Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Bluesky is built around a decentralized protocol, which helps it avoid the problems the former is facing now.
Reports say that Bluesky has seen record-high traffic this weekend as soon as Musk implemented the new policy where Twitter users can only see a limited number of posts. The increase in traffic even led to the platform's degraded performance.
If you see Bluesky as a new home for your thoughts, you might find that it is not that simple to join. For one, the social media site has temporarily halted sign-ups to fix the performance issues it is experiencing due to increased traffic.
Even after Bluesky is done addressing that, you'll still need an invite from existing Bluesky members to sign up since it is still an invite-only app. Bluesky was not clear about what was causing the degradation of the platform's performance.
There are two possibilities as pointed out by Gizmodo, one of which is that Bluesky is getting a surge of sign-ups as Twitter users are leaving the nest. It might also be traffic from current users of Bluesky or a little bit of both.
The Twitter alternative is still relatively new. In fact, it only has around 50,000 users so far. Considering that the site's performance was affected by just those numbers, it shows that Bluesky might not be ready for millions of users like Twitter has.
The company did say that they were close to completion, and it's evident that they are working toward a site that can accommodate more than 50,000 users. There are other platforms that people can switch to like Mastodon or Meta's upcoming app, Threads.
Why Are People Leaving Twitter?
Elon Musk recently made it impossible to read as many tweets as you can. Twitter now has a daily limit for the number of posts its users can view. Those who are not subscribed to Twitter Blue will only get to see 800 accounts per day, 400 for newer unverified accounts.
Even as a verified account, users will be limited to 8,000 tweets a day, as mentioned in The Verge. Although that sounds like more than enough for many, it still feels like an unfair deal especially since subscribing to Twitter Blue comes with a monthly fee.
Musk says that the limitation was to prevent AI companies from taking advantage of Twitter data, claiming that "several hundred organizations" has been scraping Twitter data to train their AI systems. It's either that or a way for Musk to push users to pay for the verification status.
