Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
I agree that it’s wild. And it’s a bit bittersweet for me.
Usenet - and the old internet as a whole - were all about humans sharing stuff between themselves: I see something cool, I give you the link, you see something cool. While modern platforms try to remove the human from the equation, make them invisible: I see something cool, I “endorse” (upvote, like etc.) it, and that endorsement is used by some algorithm to automatically pick what you’re supposed to be seeing.
Reddit is both and neither at the same time. The links are manually picked and shared, like in the old internet; but they’re algorithmically sorted and ranked as in the new internet. It’s like a product of the old internet trying to carve its way into the new internet, but never completely ditching its roots.
Perhaps that’s why that site lasted so long. And I hope that one day we’re going to say “a shame that it died”.