Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
Right, of course. I don’t really see any way any protocol can get around that though. If the original server is suddenly just gone, there is no way to tell it to move your account elsewhere. Hopefully such a situation should happen very rarely though.
Supposedly BlueSky has solved this by separating the data storage servers from the “relays” and “app view” servers, and since your account’s posts are cryptographically signed, they can come from any instance as long as the signature matches.
That at least covers migrating followers and new posts, but I’m not really sure what would happen to old posts if a data server just went offline. I’ve still got more reading to do.