X, formerly known as Twitter, has undergone multiple changes under Elon Musk’s administration. In some cases, the changes have led to backlash from users who try alternative platforms in response. That’s what’s been happening in the last few hours with modifications to the behavior of the “blocking” feature and terms of use on X. Up to half a million users could be leaving X, according to reports.
Bluesky reported half a million new users after the latest X’s announcements
Bluesky is a social platform that emerged as a rival to Twitter. It was the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, former co-founder and CEO of Twitter. However, Dorsey is not currently part of the project and has even been highly critical of it. He claims that Bluesky is making the same mistakes as Twitter and is not the original idea.
Anyway, after news about updates to the terms of use of X, Bluesky published that it received 100,000 new users. A day after the announcement, Bluesky updated the numbers, stating that they received 500,000 folks. So, up to half a million users could be leaving X right now. The influx of new people even caused an outage on Bluesky’s servers for a couple of hours.
That said, it is not the first time something like this has happened. There have been multiple instances of users massively trying out an alternative service to X/Twitter after an announcement that caused anger. However, for various reasons, many users later returned to the platform. We will likely find out in the coming hours whether the situation has changed this time.
The changes in the “blocking” feature that caused the backlash
First, the blocking function will no longer work as it has until now. When you block a profile on X, it prevents you from viewing any posts or replies from that particular profile. It also prevents the blocked profile from interacting with you. If the profile comments on a post you are reading or a contact shares a post from that profile, you will only see a message indicating that the post has limited visibility. If you tried to check that account, you would only see a message saying that you blocked it (or you were blocked) on the feed.
However, X is rolling out a new behavior for the block option. Now, all public posts on the blocked profile will still be accessible, but the account will not be able to interact with you. Of course, it won’t be able to send you direct messages or anything similar. Notably, checking the feed of a blocked profile was not particularly difficult. Opening said profile from a tab in “Incognito mode” of your browser was enough.
Elon Musk showed intentions to change the way the “block” feature works last year. It even seems that his initial intention was to remove it, since in August 2023 he said that it “makes no sense.” However, more than a year later, the X dev team is only changing the behavior of the option.
New AI training policies too
The other reason behind the backslash is the new data usage policies for AI training. Until now, X only used the platform’s content to train Grok, its own AI-powered chatbot. However, the platform will now allow third parties to use X’s content to train their AI models as well. The topic of artificial intelligence training always generates controversy, and this time was no exception. The artists were particularly unhappy with the announcement.
