September 10, 2024: Sometimes The Lack Of A Story Is A Story

I've been fascinated by the standoff between X (formerly Twitter) and Brazil – mostly because it meant a huge influx of people came onto Bluesky for the first time. The social-media platform has added millions of new users in the past few days, with some activity seeing a 10-fold increase from a week prior.

What's really interesting from my perspective is that the Bluesky computer systems have continued to remain functional during the surge. Minor glitches have arisen, but certainly nothing to indicate that their servers are on fire; it's continued to just work.

As much as we'd be thrilled if two million new folks were suddenly interested in (say) Gelatinous, I'm not at all sure our web server could handle that many folks curious about the wandering-slime dice game – certainly not without our IT folks furiously rejiggering aflame computers amid a shower of sparks like a Star Trek engineering scene.

If you're new to Bluesky, we have an account over there. It's not terribly active at the moment, but things can change quickly in the social-media space. Just ask Brazil.

-- Steven Marsh