By Bluesky, a potential competitor to Twitter, experienced a surge in traffic following Elon Musk’s announcement that Twitter would temporarily limit the number of posts users can read per day. Musk cited data scraping and system manipulation as reasons for the restrictions, setting different limits for verified and unverified accounts. Users who reached their allocated number of posts encountered a “Rate limit exceeded” message. As a result, people turned to Bluesky, a text-based social media site backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Bluesky reported degraded performance and temporarily paused sign-ups due to the increased traffic but later resumed them.
Bluesky, initially incubated within Twitter in 2019, operates on the AT Protocol, a decentralized networking technology that allows users to maintain their identities across multiple platforms. In February 2022, the Bluesky project formed the Bluesky Public Benefit LLC, with Jay Graber as CEO and Dorsey as a founding board member. The company secured $13 million in funding in April 2022 to support research and development. By April 2023, Bluesky had amassed over 50,000 users.
Bluesky is not the only emerging competitor to Twitter. Mastodon, a decentralized messaging app, garnered significant interest in November. Meta, the parent company of social media giant Facebook, confirmed its exploration of a decentralized social network for text updates. Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, briefly appeared on the Google Play store, suggesting that Meta may be preparing for its launch. However, Meta has not yet responded to CNBC’s request for comment.
