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

Copying over my latest backend status update; figure folks would find it interesting

Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outage.

We use an event-sourcing model which is: K/V database for primary storage (actually sqlite), into a golang event stream, then into scylladb for computed views. Various separate services for search, algorithms, and images. Hybrid on-prem & cloud. There are ~20 of the k/v servers, 1 event-stream, 2 scylla clusters (I believe).

The event-stream crash would cause the application to stop making progress on ingesting events, but we still got the writes, so you'd see eg likes failing to increment the counter but then magically taking effect 60 seconds later. Since the scylla cluster and the KV stores stayed online, we avoided a full outage.

Does Bluesky intend to be responsive to the kind of court orders that X rejected?

Speaking entirely personally as I don't handle those questions at bsky. I couldn't even begin to comment without seeing knowing what the court orders were and what the cases are. Every social company operating internationally runs into this issue, and it's daunting to say the least. So, again, this is not something I decide.

What I can say is that the protocol is a neutral global layer for data, which can then enable multiple applications with their own moderation policies and decisions. There's always going to be moderation decisions we make that people will disagree with. The point is that something can be done about that disagreement - you can have other applications on the same network that makes their own decisions. I think one of the best things that could happen is that Brazilian developers fork the Bluesky app and build locally-owned social platforms on the atmosphere.