Surprise! Bluesky to slap rate limits on users as traffic skyrockets

Bluesky Social, the decentralized microblogging platform owned by Jack Dorsey, has announced rate limits to maintain stability and security.

Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky Social will impose rate limits on certain actions on the platform. (Bloomberg)

Since Elon Musk's takeover, X (formerly known as Twitter) has undergone a myriad of changes. The introduction of Twitter Blue, imposing temporary restrictions, and rebranding to X are just some of the drastic steps taken by the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. Witnessing this, many users had enough and they've been flocking to other microblogging platforms, namely Instagram's Threads and Jack Dorsey's Bluesky Social. While the former is a rapidly developing platform that is open to everyone, the latter is still in an invite-only phase, but still has hit the headlines recently as a number of celebrities and eminent personalities have joined it.

Seeing record traffic, Bluesky suffered network issues a number of times. In fact, every time Musk announced a change on Twitter, there were a huge number of people leaving the platform. It is believed that they went to other social media platforms and caused the servers of Bluesky at least to slow down considerably. Now, as a result, Bluesky has announced it will impose some restrictions on users in order to maintain the stability of the platform.

Bluesky Social announces rate limits

A TechCrunch report says that the Jack Dorsey-owned Bluesky Social has announced the imposition of rate limits in order to maintain the stability and security of the decentralized microblogging platform. However, the platform emphasized that this move would not impact the user experience. “This update should *not* affect your experience on the service”, Bluesky announced in a post.

The reason behind this move is reportedly an influx of users who seem to have shifted onto the platform after Elon Musk announced that X would be getting rid of the block feature, reiterating his previous belief that “Blocking public posts makes no sense. It needs to be deprecated in favor of a stronger form of mute”.

As per the report, Bluesky on August 19 saw almost 5,616 new user registrations in the last 24 hours, which was a humongous amount compared to just 536 in the previous 24 hours. Due to this surge in traffic, we reported that the platform began to suffer with issues pertaining to load times, and random errors. Bluesky later announced, “Early today, we experienced degraded performance on our server, causing the app to be slow for users, but this is now resolved”.

To counter this issue, Bluesky will be imposing rate limits which will aid in boosting the platform's stability. It will not affect the platform as a whole but only specific actions such as updating the user handle or resetting passwords.