A record number of users to flocked to Dorsey-backed Bluesky. Credit: Getty Images / NurPhoto / Contributor

Bluesky, the Twitter competitor backed by former CEO Jack Dorsey, has received “record-high traffic” over the past couple of days following Elon Musk’s controversial tweet-read limit.

Musk claims the tweet limits are temporary and designed to stop “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” on the social media platform.

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The announced cap on reading tweets, which was originally 600 for unverified accounts and 6000 for verified accounts, was met with a fierce backlash from Twitter users.

Musk switched the limits a number of times on 1 July, finally settling on verified accounts limited to viewing 10,000 tweets a day and unverified accounts limited to 1,000. 

This has reportedly led a record number of users to flock to Dorsey-backed Bluesky, a rival short text based social media platform sharing similarities to Twitter. 

According to the company, the platform was experiencing “some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic”.

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“Elon Musk’s recent decision to limit daily tweet views could signal a strategic shift, potentially creating opportunities for social media start-ups,” Anna Lee, founder of social media platform Frog APP told Verdict.

Lee added: “While the move may unsettle Twitter’s professional users and even encourage a shift to rival platforms, the real pivot lies in the rise of alternative networks ready to embrace these users.”

Bluesky was introduced by Dorsey in 2019 when he was still Twitter’s CEO. He claimed that Twitter was backing “a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers,” with the mission of creating a decentralised standard for social media. 

Despite it looking extremely similar to Twitter, the platform’s selling point is that it uses an open-source framework – meaning those outside the company are able to see how it’s being built. 

Bluesky was initially integrated into Twitter and remained there until Musk took over in October 2022.