The chaos at Twitter seems to have had an impact on Bluesky, which is a decentralised Twitter-like social network. Reportedly, it is “temporarily” suspending new signups in order to attempt to address performance issues it has been having since Twitter implemented restrictions on the number of tweets its users may view in a day. Bluesky still requires an invite code to join; however, it appears that the increase in new members has caused some issues.
According to a post from Bluesky, “We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality. We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!”
At the moment, the status page of Bluesky points out that the platform is currently exhibiting “degraded performance,” with the first indication of problems occurring at 1:47 PM ET. As per a report by the Verge, the publication has expressed that “degraded performance” sounds like an accurate descriptor because although posts on the web frequently take a very long time to load, the Verge claims that it can generally still get them to load. The publication feels that the iOS app seems to operate a little more smoothly.
Bluesky stated in a post at 2:03 PM ET that it is seeing “record-high traffic.” According to Bluesky developer Paul Frazee, it is also releasing updates for its mobile apps in an effort to fix issues.
All this comes as Twitter starts imposing restrictions on unregistered users. Now, if someone wants to view a tweet, they are supposed to login first. This implies that if someone is not on the app, they now need to create an account. The owner, Elon Musk, has claimed that all of these are “temporary emergency measures,” as the platform has claimed that too much data is being scrapped off the platform. As per Verge, Mastodon is also experiencing a surge in users. The report suggests that the platform saw more than 26,000 new accounts.
Musk has claimed that these web scrapers are responsible for pulling out data from the platform without the need for any API. However, Twitter’s API is now severely limited and costs a minimum of $42,000 per month.
To strengthen these emergency measures further, Twitter has put restrictions on how many tweets a user can access in a day. Twitter launched a restriction on the number of tweets one can view, even for paid subscribers to Twitter Blue. Those who have verified accounts will be able to read 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts will have access to 600 posts a day, and new unverified accounts will have access to 300 posts a day. Due to this, users have reported that they are seeing “rate limit exceeded” messages, and this has led to topics related to “Twitter going down” becoming the trending topics.
All of this comes at a time when Meta is preparing to launch its own Twitter rival.
