Ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, the platform has gradually descended into dismay with Musk’s erratic changes. However, the platform’s recent decision to limit the number of tweets a user can see in a day could very well be the final nail in the coffin as many users have started to flock towards alternatives like BlueSky, which has had to temporarily halt signups in order to address performance issues.
In a recent statement, the company stated, “We will temporarily pause Bluesky sign-ups while our team resolves the existing performance issues. We will update you on when invite codes will be available again. We are excited to welcome more users to our beta version soon!”
What is BlueSky?
Although similar in interface to Twitter, BlueSky, developed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, differentiates itself by allowing users to customize their algorithms and fine-tune their feeds to display a diverse range of posts. Additionally, the platform also utilizes an in-house, open-source framework called the AT Protocol, which promotes transparency by enabling users to understand its structure and ongoing development.
However, despite being in an invite-only phase, Musk’s recent decisions have caused signups for BlueSky to skyrocket. As a result, BlueSky’s status page currently states that the platform is experiencing “degraded performance,” with posts taking a significant amount of time to load.
Twitter is digging its own grave
While Twitter has always found itself in a slew of controversies, the platform’s decision to block browsing access for unregistered users and implement a temporary ‘view limit’ on the number of posts a user can see per day has sparked widespread outrage. This is because users who previously had unlimited access to tweets are now restricted to 600 tweets per day for unverified accounts, 6000 tweets per day for verified accounts, and a mere 300 tweets per day for new unverified accounts.
Elon Musk defended the decision by citing data scraping activities by AI startups, such as ChatGPT, which utilize Twitter data to train their models. Additionally, he also expressed concerns that this data exploitation was negatively impacting the experience of regular users.