Bluesky could become Brazil’s next big social media platform. It has Elon Musk’s X to thank

In Brazil, X’s loss is Bluesky’s gain.

The decentralized social media platform spun off from Twitter in 2022 has seen a surge of around 3.5 million new users, bringing its total user base to more than 10 million. That uptick follows a recent Supreme Court court decision to ban X (formerly Twitter) in Brazil. More than 93% of these new users speak Portuguese, according to app intelligence firm Appfigures.

The ban on X follows a monthslong dispute between platform owner Elon Musk and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes over X’s failure to comply with multiple court orders and its decision to close its offices to avoid legal consequences. Late last month, the court ordered Brazil’s mobile and internet providers to block X, and set a daily fine for anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) to access the app. 

X was essentially rendered inaccessible in Brazil until this past Wednesday, when it skirted the ban by routing its internet traffic through Cloudflare, a third party internet-infrastructure provider. The number of X posts made in Brazil rose from 939,000 on Tuesday to more than two million by late afternoon Wednesday, according to data analysis company Bites. 

Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang tells Fast Company the migration of users leaving X to join Bluesky resulted in the team’s 14 engineers working “around the clock.” She says while there’s been some performance degradation during what’s quickly become Bluesky’s largest user migration yet, Wang says their systems have so far remained intact. 

In an effort to cater to Brazilian users, who highly value video content, Bluesky rolled out new video capabilities last week, allowing users to share videos of up to 60 seconds on the platform. 

“It was already in the works, because we were already investing in Brazil,” Wang says. “But I do think it prompted us to push it forward as quickly as we could.” 

Bluesky has always maintained a “strong foothold” in Brazil, according to Wang. Soon after Bluesky first launched its beta version last year, Taylor Swift fans and LGBTQ communities in Brazil were among the early adopters. After receiving their feedback, the team quickly rolled out a new GIF feature.

“I think it’s because Brazilians are extremely social, extremely chatty, and so they love trying new social media platforms,” Wang says. 

Bluesky was originally conceptualized by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Initially funded by Twitter, Bluesky was spun off as an independent team in 2022, and is now a public benefit corporation with around 40 employees. The company last raised a $8 million seed funding round in July 2023 with venture capital firms and angel investors, including Dorsey. (Dorsey left the company’s board in 2024, saying Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company.”)

Bluesky has a Twitter-like user interface, and is strong at curating trending content and engaging with local audiences, reminiscent of old Twitter. Focused on localization while also global conversation, the type of content posted on Bluesky is more similar to X than other competitors, according to social media consultant Matt Navarro. 

“Translation tools and features that help with the localization of content are particularly useful,” Navarro says. 

Bluesky has also won users looking for community-specific content moderation, which hinges upon Bluesky’s structure of decentralization and federation. In a decentralized platform like Bluesky, moderation can be handled by individual communities, allowing for community-specific rules and guidelines. In contrast, traditional social media platforms like X have moderation policies that are centralized and enforced uniformly across the platform. This federated model allows individuals more control over the environments they participate in. 

“All that really means is that we wanted users to have more choice. They could choose different feeds, they would own their identity, and own their data,” Wang says. “We believe the new paradigm of social [media] is that the platform shouldn’t be in control. We the people should be in control, just like we live offline.” 

Bluesky’s base layer of moderation is a 24-hour moderation team that monitors for things like harassment and hate speech. On top, users have the power to label content and accounts, so there can be consequences for behavior like rudeness, which is not expressly illegal on the terms of service. 

“It feels less toxic and dangerous and problematic than Elon Musk’s X,” Navarro says. “It’s actually a more meaningful, valuable experience when using it. I think that’s what Bluesky has been particularly good at.”

Unlike X, Wang says Bluesky plans to continue to comply with regions and work with governments, as Bluesky’s decentralized model allows local communities to enforce their own rules without affecting users globally.

She says Bluesky aims to give community builders the tools they need to create a space for their community, from curating a feed to moderating content. The influx in users will not alter the team’s strategy, as Wang says they planned to continue to invest in content moderation and the “big world small world experience” that defines Bluesky.

“It’s all about experimentation—we’re cocreating this with you,” Wang says. “The whole idea of it being decentralized is that we’re distributing power, so that anything we can do, you can do.”