Elon Musk scares 1 million users with a new idea

The social media platform has changed a lot since it was taken over by the tech billionaire. Now the de facto abolition of the blocking function is causing a huge number of users to turn their backs on the short message service and switch to the competition.

X eliminates blocking

The block feature is a common way to control who can see your social media profile. All platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X make this feature available to their users. But that is now changing. Because for Elon Musk, blocking “makes no sense.” Therefore, the owner of the platform announced last year that he wanted to remove the function. Loud TechRadar This has now started at X. However, the blocking does not disappear completely. Nevertheless, in its new form it hardly fulfills its actual purpose.

Because blocking someone in the future only means that the person can no longer interact with the posts. But reading is still possible. This means it is still possible for stalkers or trolls to follow a person.

Users flock to the competition

With the reconfirmation of this adjustment by one Engineering account post from X on October 16th, a flood of users now seems to have been scared away from the platform. Competitor Bluesky, a project by former co-founder and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, reports that it has gained over 100,000 new users in the twelve hours since the announcement.

This immense rush even led to the service’s servers being briefly brought to their knees. With one notice The Bluesky team welcomed over 1.2 million new users to its own platform on October 18th. The number has now probably increased again. A total of 12 million people have an account with the X competitor. With over 600 million estimated users, X is still in a completely different league.

Other reasons for user churn

In addition to the adjusted block function, X’s AI plans probably also play a role in the churn of users. In the future, third-party providers will be able to train their models with the platform’s content. The temporary shutdown of X in Brazil also led to many users switching to Bluesky.