Left-leaning social media site Bluesky crashed Thursday as two million new users joined after owner Elon Musk got a role in Donald Trump‘s new administration.
Developers warned the site was likely to act up, though they didn’t single out the massive influx of the former Twitter’s refugees as the cause.
Samuel Newman said Bluesky was in read-only mode temporarily ‘because something fell over’ – and once it was restored it was still slow.
‘Today will get interesting! If the site goes down, maybe grab a soda, pet the kitty. We’ll hit it with a wrench as fast as we can,’ his colleague Paul Frazee wrote.
Frazee warned users they could expect posts and links to look like they didn’t work or weren’t posted because the site was loading slowly.
More than a million users signed up to Bluesky since Trump named Musk the co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday.
Trump said that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would ‘dismantle’ the $6.5 trillion federal government by co-leading the ‘Manhattan Project of our time’.
About 2.1 million signed up and the number of active users doubled since November 6, when Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election to Trump.
Twitter, now branded as X, boasted it attracted more US visitors than ever on the same day, as Trump fans celebrated.
Yet it also saw 115,000 American users deactivate, a record daily high under Musk’s tenure.
Bluesky is almost visually indistinguishable from X, with its logo being a butterfly in an identical shade of blue to the former Twitter bird.
It was originally created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2019 and grew after Musk’s acquisition of the social media giant.
Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, also launced Threads last year, which is far bigger with 15 million new accounts this month alone – as many as the total number of Bluesky users.
Both are seen as having liberal-leaning userbases that can seem like left-wing echo chambers due to algorithms.
Conversely, Twitter lurched to the right since Musk bought it, as those on the left steadily departed or stopped using it in favor of Threads or nothing.
Outraged over Musk‘s support and promotion of Trump, record numbers fled the Tesla tycoon’s social media platform, including the singer Lizzo, who jokingly nicknamed the switch to Bluesky ‘the great migration’.
The Guardian also said it would no longer post on the ‘toxic’ site in the wake of the November 5 result, complaining about how Musk used Twitter’s ‘influence to shape political discourse’.
The left-leaning newspaper’s boycott also cited the ‘often disturbing content’ such as ‘far-right conspiracy theories and racism’.
Bluesky on Wednesday shot to the top spot in the iPhone App Store – ahead of Meta‘s X/Twitter competitor Threads, ChatGPT, and Google.
Meanwhile, X sits 25th in the free app rankings, behind McDonald’s, Facebook, YouTube, Indeed, and Amazon.
