This text was updated at 12:42 AM on Aug. 31 with the most recent numbers.
Bluesky added around 500,000 new users from Brazil in a 48-hour period, the largest influx of Brazilians on the platform since its launch, solidifying the country's position among the top 5 nationalities on the social network.
The platform, which uses an open source protocol and was launched in April 2023 as one of many alternatives to Twitter, is currently on high alert to ensure that the systems continue to function properly despite the large influx of users.
The average number of new users on the platform ranges from 4,000 to 6,000 per day. "I can tell you that every single engineer on the team right now have their computers on, and they're watching the infra to make sure nothing goes down", said Bluesky’s COO, Rose Wang, in an interview with Nucleo.
"Large waves of Brazilian users have come to Bluesky in the past, but we've never seen numbers like we saw today."
– Rose Wang, Bluesky.
Brazil is now comfortably among the largest nationalities on the platform, alongside Japan, the United States and the UK.
In about 20 hours, 105,000 new users from Brazil were added to Bluesky's user base. In comparison, during the same period, 4,000 were added from the United States, 1,000 from Portugal, 1,000 from the UK, and only 700 from Japan.
"This tends to be a cumulative effect of platform reputation, where each user can choose where to go now," she said.
On Friday (aug.30), Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension of X/Twitter throughout Brazil, something that might bring even more users to Bluesky in the coming days – a number that had already been rising since Wednesday (aug.28) when the STF issued an ultimatum for Elon Musk to appoint a new legal representative for Brazil or face suspension.
Sérgio Spagnuolo
Wang did not reveal how many Brazilian users are currently on the platform. It is estimated that X/Twitter has around 40 million users in Brazil who access the service at least once a month.
