Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

Several folks in Brazil had much to choose from out of Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky as alternatives to Twitter / X.

Now that X got banned in Brazil and to potentially lose over 100M+ users we are starting to see which platforms they are choosing to sign up to.

So far, Bluesky is seeing a surge in user registrations after the invite system was lifted a year ago. I would expect Threads to also see a surge in registrations as well.

Mastodon however appears not to be even considered as a migration path at all yet, but either way it is still early days for all options.

We'll see in the next 6 months after this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471807

Where are you pulling your statistics from?

I'm looking at one of the Mastodon Users Count bots and it seems like there's a 43% increase in sign-ups per weeks since last week. Of course, I have no idea why and that might be normal noise.

Seems there is another increase in last ~2 hours: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11305699278921998...

Mastodon was dead from the start, it isn’t in the running.

Threads has too big of an image problem to overcome. No one wants Instagram for Twitter.

Bluesky is the only platform currently that has a chance, but it’s an under funded, tiny team who can’t ship on time. Bluesky will see a surge in registrations but no change in DAU as they still haven’t supported video, so no one will stay on the site.

Why do you believe that about Mastodon?

> No one wants Instagram for Twitter

It has about 200M MAU. So a lot of people clearly do want it.

How are the MAU counted for Threads, as the user accounts are the same exact as on Instagram?

The URLs are different (threads.net versus instagram.com).

So pretty easy to tell in the analytics which site the user is on.

What about the app? As far as I know, Instagram users were getting Threads notifications inside the app.

Mastodon is too fragmented for the common people, and any chance of that being popular is getting usurped by Bluesky anyway.

Onboarding and discovery is much too difficult for the average user. Distributed is technologically cool, but will remain niche IMO.

The instagram app desperately wants me to post to threads, see all the fun stuff i'm missing on threads, and just join threads in general.

PS: Nice to see our resident mastodon hater (OP) is still at it, including the requisite smug "told-you-so"/"i totally predicted this!!~" link :D

Mastadon is the green ribbon worn by 13 people out of 57 people attending a conference out of 230 million people in that country who were there to condemn, in strong terms, the privatisation of the national health service.

Thread doesn’t stand a chance. I don’t have an Instagram account. So I am not going to create one for Threads. Nope. I know friends and colleagues who detest even the idea of this connection even though they have accounts.

Meta/Fb didn’t create X/Tw competition/alternative. They created an Instagram add-on.

Does bsky stand a chance? Probably? Does ATProto stand a chance? Nope, it doesn’t. Sad, but it doesn’t. It has the same Mastadon problems - not technical but practical.

> Thread doesn’t stand a chance

Twitter/X has 368m MAU. Threads has 200m.

Based on trajectories Threads will be the biggest text-first social network in less than a year.

It's amazing how out of touch people on here about what is popular or not.

Mastodon isn't distributed, like bittorrent; it's decentralized, like email.