Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day

What happened on Oct 17? I can't really find anything that would cause such a dramatic uptick on that day specifically.

Got to be a podcast or something popular that Donald Trump appeared on

That was the time we learned about the changes to the block feature.

That, and the TOS update which now requires users to give X blanket permission to use their posts for AI training (previously you could opt-out). Not that AI companies really care whether they have permission right now, but if legal precedent doesn't go their way then coercing users into "giving permission" by burying it within 50 pages of TOS legalese will be the fallback plan.

A bigger jump seemed to be Aug 28 - Sept 7 (daily likers 200k => 1M+). I wonder why. (also some days are missing there, so maybe something changed in the data collection).

Brazil banned twitter

that was the day they officially announced the change to how blocking worked, notifying all users (the owner had mused about it a month earlier)