Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.
Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform’s entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.
The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website “Bluesky Stats.” Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.
It’s impossible to know whether Musk’s comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.
If that were true, the investors who paid him billions for the take over will want his head on a spike.
If you’d know who these investors are, you’d know running twitter to ground is their goal at this point as well
deleted by creator
Plausible deniability, combined with opportunism. If they brought it, and shut it down, it would be painfully obvious. This could cause significant problems or pushback on them. Musk being an idiot provided an opportunity to them. They back musk, and he makes it non viable, however he wants. All the public outrage gets focused onto musk (who likes the attention).
I still can’t decide between the 2 options. Either musk is just THAT big of an idiot, or if it’s the result of some backroom deal. Both seem feasible.
Ok, but why though? How do you make money when the stock value is falling?
The theory is they’re not trying to make money, but is trying to make it harder to use Twitter for organizing protests or share ideas that threaten their status quo.
Interesting. So are you saying there’s government money behind this?
Biggest investor is Saudi Arabia.
Ok, so this is just a way to prevent another Arab spring from happening. Seems like a smart move until you realize that people have lots of alternative platforms too. It’s a bit more fragmented, so organizing a demonstration on mastodon probably won’t get that big that fast.
deleted by creator
I suspect that might have been their intent but they didn’t tell Musk. They knew him doing his best would be enough to tank it.
Yeah, his ego won’t allow him to fail with grace.
deleted by creator
The biggest funders are the Saudis, who hate Twitter for the way it allowed communication during The Arab Spring. 42 billion is nothing to them. They want Twitter to die, or be run the way the want it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring