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Bluesky now has 30 million users
- hirokio123 2y agoX's MAU has reached about 570 million. I just hope it doesn't collapse under its own weight before getting there. Do they have any secret strategies to sustain it?
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoCan we make a meaningful comparison between the two, given that they're both private companies that could just be saying whatever they want people to hear? I mean, I have no doubt that Twitter is an order of magnitude greater in popularity, but there are so many factors at play here, especially given the number of bots and duplicate accounts in existence.
- hirokio123 2y agoIt's X, not Twitter. The good old Twitter has flown away into the blue sky. Bots and duplicate accounts are certainly an issue, but that's also a concern for the platform operators who want to maximize advertising effectiveness. Fake numbers will never translate into real results.
- guelo 2y agoHow do you know that number?
- ritcgab 2y agoElon said it last month.
- hirokio123 2y agoJust ChatGPT it
- homebrewer 2y agoYou would think people would learn from their mistakes and not move onto another centralized platform backed by VC money, but here we are.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoYou don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy.
- speedgoose 2y agoPeople don’t really care about decentralisation. Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoAnd it didn't involve a really confusing question as a barrier to entry.
- Krssst 2y agoBluesky asks about which server to use on registration like mastodon.social does. For me the difference seems to be better marketing for Bluesky which makes people want to deal with the change and somewhat enjoy it rather than see every obstacle as a pain. Bluesky does have some advantages like starter packs (and network effect now that it has so many accounts).
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoNot sure if we're using the same method, but when I go to sign up it asks me for a username, then selects <username>@bsky.social as my full username.
- mozzius 2y agoOn the previous screen, you can change your account provider
- robertlagrant 2y agoIs this MAU or total signups?
- Arathorn 2y agototal: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
- baal80spam 2y agoSo not users but accounts.
- psionides 2y agoMAU is 12M+: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- benob 2y agoWhat's the real business model behind it? Sell "custom" names? That's not going to get you very far.
- Shacklz 2y agoI wish there wasn't a need for a business-model to begin with for social media. Honestly, being business-driven is what turns them all to shit, as far as I'm concerned. That being said, the lights need to be kept on somehow... some model similar to what Signal or wikipedia does might be a solution. Content-moderation is probably the big challenge though that they do not have to deal with to the same extent, so not quite sure how that could fly either...
- psionides 2y agoThey want to add some optional subscriptions in near future (a la Discord), and more long term they want to have some way of creators earning money from their followers and Bluesky getting a commission from that.
- vr46 2y agoYet another shitshow-in-waiting. I know Mastodon isn’t as polished but leaving one frying pan to get into another is a lost opportunity. I failed to convince somebody to move to Mastodon recently.
- richrichardsson 2y agoIn my experience there's a huge barrier to entry for Mastodon. I've tried finding a server that worthwhile signing up to on 3 past occasions, every time I found one that seemed like a good fit they weren't accepting signups. Bluesky I got in before it was opened up by adding my email to the waitlist. Simple. And now it's even easier because there is no waitlist.
- technothrasher 2y agoI'm honestly not much of a social network user, but I signed up with universeodon and it seems to work fine as a mastodon server. Most of the people I follow are on different servers anyway, so I didn't worry so much about finding a server that was a "good fit" for me.
- prmoustache 2y agoDid you use this: https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers ? I used it and found a decent one, managed by someone relatively local and active. Most of my followed accounts are on other servers but I haven't seen that as a big issue.
- vr46 2y agoI agree that there's a barrier, but it's not huge. Mastodon really could use some people versed in marketing and onboarding. People use email without realizing that it's decentralized, I tried to draw parallels between that and Mastodon to my friend, but I failed.
- agumonkey 2y agoI can't explain it fully but mastodon seems more confusing than bluesky, maybe too much emphasis on "you can have any server" which then creates more questions than it's necessary. It has also more features and terms.. while bluesky seems more efficient at getting you living in good old twitter like world which is people (at least I) missed ?
- nspattak 2y agohalf the comments so far talk about bluesky being similar to x ie private companies. However AFAIK the use of the "AT protocol" seems to me to be a major difference https://bsky.social/about/faq https://bsky.social/about/faq. I am really curious to know how I am wrong in that. As a long time X user and now on bluesky i can tell that there is a huge difference in the content which makes it clear that the platform was pushing accounts with specific political views (or muting others)
- LtWorf 2y agoThey all start neutral.
- s_dev 2y agoThey don't e.g. Parler and Gab
- agumonkey 2y agoshallow knowledge on my side, but it seems that the AT proto requires some fancy relay node that, as of now, are only hosted by big corps, so no one has a a fully independent bsky instance
- Pufferbo 2y agoThis seems to be left out of the conversation when comparing Bluesky with the wider fediverse. The AT protocol relies on a bespoke setup and is complicated to implement. ActivityPub is comparatively simple, and can be implemented on pretty every thing with just a few endpoints.
- donohoe 2y agoIf ActivityPub is “simple” then that’s a recent’ish development. It used to be a mess. I would imagine AT gets easier to use/setup given time too.
- 2y ago
- firecall 2y agoBluesky - the Social Network where everybody posts screenshots of the awful things people post on other social networks!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ayhanfuat 2y agoExactly. I saw way more Elon and Trump posts on Bluesky than I saw on Twitter.
- Kelteseth 2y agoThen you clearly follow the wrong people. I do not have this issue...
- ayhanfuat 2y agoAre you sure? I followed the Bluesky link on your profile and immediately saw two screenshots of Elon’s tweets.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI saw Elon posts on my following feed (whatever X now calls it) even though I wasn't following him. I even got notifications for them! I don't really know how anyone can think that's acceptable.
- sylware 2y agoAnd does it have interop with noscript/basic (x)html browser?
- ChicagoDave 2y agoNo Ads. 100% user-centric moderation controls. Blockity block! Block lists are a godsend. This is what made Dorsey quit the board and abandon the platform. He actually believed the masses wanted a libertarian platform that forced you to listen to assholes. We don’t. No opaque algorithms controlling your timeline. Feeds to create topic centric timelines. Decentralized. You can host your own data. Other hosts can offer refuge if Bluesky went rogue. Bluesky doesn’t own the data. Many independent journalists have moved over so we’re getting significantly better news and not the false equivalence nonsense peddled by most of the major media outlets. And kittens, birds, dogs, deer, raccoons, and other heartwarming animal posts.
- FreeTrade 2y agoMuting is fine, blocking is censorship. You'll know it is decentralized when someone can run an instance and remove the blocking and censorship. (Never, I predict)
- ChicagoDave 2y agoThe users are doing the blocking, not Bluesky. We’re just slamming the door in the face of Nazis and fascists. It’s my individual right to avoid assholes. Not censorship.
- FreeTrade 2y agoThat's what your mute is for. 100% support that. Bluesky preventing users from replying to your posts on your say-so. Yup, there's a word for that.
- ChicagoDave 2y agoYeah, it’s called harassment.
- paulgb 2y agoYou already could have a client that treats a block as a mute. Easier to just open an incognito tab though. > In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and client. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/block-implementation https://docs.bsky.app/blog/block-implementation
- retskrad 2y agoMonthly active users in a vacuum docent mean anything. Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users but has zero relevance. Bluesky and Threads have no cultural foot print compared to X.
- Kelteseth 2y agoRussian bots are not "cultural foot print"
- liveoneggs 2y agoThey are when major news outlets with 100+ years of history write entire articles based on their direction, or even just reference single tweets as justification for an entire opinion article.
- waysa 2y agoZero relevance to what/who? There are a lot of "older" people on Facebook who are on no other platform. Super useful for targeted advertising. X users are more likely to also use other social media like Instagram and TikTok. This is why companies can afford stop advertising on X without much issue.
- ggddv 2y agoMy estimates show X has at most 200,000 real English languages users. Can anyone prove X even has 1/30th of bluesky? Can’t count bots.
- paulgb 2y agoHow do you arrive at that estimate?
- upofadown 2y agoBluesky is less attractive right now to Canadians who are participating in the boycott of US products. So Mastodon seems a better fit. There is even a collector page for Canadian Mastodon servers: * https://mastodonserver.ca/ https://mastodonserver.ca/
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- mpalmer 2y agoSo instead of paying Bluesky nothing to commiserate with millions of Americans who hate Trump and the tariffs too, you intend to isolate?
- scirob 2y agoIsolation is indeed the vibe on mastodon. And they get upset when they realize that all their posts are publically boradcast over an open websocket api.
- GiorgioG 2y agoIn a few months Bluesky will have more users than Canada has people.
- rvz 2y ago> Bluesky is less attractive right now to Canadians who are participating in the boycott of US products. How many people are boycotting these US products which specifically includes not using iPhones, Macs, Android and Windows devices? Out of that, how many are going to bother to choose to sign up to a Mastodon instance that is only hosted in Canada and use it for more than a year? My guess is a very small number of people. Realistically they don't care and the boycott won't last and the majority are still more likely to sign up to either Threads or BlueSky than to even consider Mastodon.
- selykg 2y agoBoycotts can take on different levels. I'd personally say that if you already own an iPhone, Android phone, Mac or PC, you've already given them your money, but you can absolutely refuse to give more the next time around and buy something from another manufacturer that's not US based. But it doesn't make sense to just throw out your perfectly fine $1000+ device just to "stick it to the man."
- apichat 2y agoContrary to what we could thought, Bluesky doesn't asks about which server to use on registration. It's not federate.
- haileyok 2y agoThere are thousands of third party PDSes on the network https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping?tab=readme-ov-file#third-party-servers https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping?tab=readme-ov-f...
- bpoyner 2y agoYou mean the social network that keeps showing my wife dick pics even though she turned off adult content? That social network? Pass.
- SadTrombone 2y agoI haven't seen a single nude, dick or otherwise on my Bluesky feed. Perhaps your wife doth protest too much? ;)
- dewey 2y agoThe number of times I've seen straight up porn and OnlyFans content on Twitter in my feed in the recent months is 100% higher than what I've ever encountered on BS.
- madeofpalk 2y ago...how? What feed? Is she following people who post dick pics? Not doubting her experience, but I've never experienced this (accidentally).
- llm_nerd 2y agoSome of the algorithmic feeds on Bluesky feature a non-zero number of dudes holding their dicks (posted without NSFW tagging). "What's Hot Classic" has a serious problem with this. And no, this isn't personalized at all. https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/feed/hot-classic https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/feed/hot-classic That feed was defaulted for my account so for the longest time I assumed the community there was largely gay men (along with a surprising percentage of weird furry stuff). And good for them, but it just wasn't my kink to see dudes holding their dicks or sexy animal illustrations in my feed. The discover feed seems to be absent this problem. But WHC should be either given a warning to user or at a minimum start doing some "guy holding his dick" AI inference and auto-tag those posts.
- MD87 2y agoAny kind of third-party what's hot/trending feed seems to. I guess they get a lot of likes in certain circles... e.g. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dbipwza2663x6hfp2purbn7i/feed/aaaax6belyaom https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dbipwza2663x6hfp2purbn7i/fe...
- linuxftw 2y agoThe reason Twitter was successful is they paid celebrities and corporations to join their network. That usage seems to have waned in favor of Instagram, but Twitter is still the #1 place for breaking news, especially in the sports world. I think many people supporting bluesky assume the value is in attracting the plebeians. I don't see that being the case. There are already Facebook groups and reddit (among traditional forums) if you want to interact with your peers. Is bluesky an alternative to twitter? In form, yes, in function, no.
- Lutger 2y agoNot yet, but in the echo chamber I dwell in, a lot of orgs are joining Bluesky, and most actually left X. These are mostly journalists, scientists or people involved in politics. At some point, it may become impossible for some of these groups - probably starting with journalists - to do their work and not be on bluesky. They will be on X and bluesky. Maybe. If it happens, then bluesky will eventually replace X. Because it will not be long before it will also be possible to leave X, probably the last to do so will also be journalists. Its more efficient that way. Then it will be just nazis and shitposters on X, and X will go the way of Digg and MySpace. Alternatively, Twitter could also fragment completely and we'll never have an equivalent network again. There's no law stating we must have a single such network where are the celebs, news orgs and scientists hang out.
- rsynnott 2y ago> The reason Twitter was successful is they paid celebrities and corporations to join their network. I mean, define 'successful'. Twitter was _culturally important_ for a long time before it was a must-use by celebrities, and it's never been particularly successful in terms of reach (it has a similar MAU to Pinterest, which apparently still exists) or in financial terms. Like, for a lot of former Twitter users, Bluesky is _already_ successful; it is an adequate replacement for old-Twitter for their needs. That's all that most people are looking for, really.
- conradfr 2y agoIn France there has been a clear (and coordinated) exodus of people from the left from X to Bluesky. They also actively try to ban anyone from the right who post there. It makes for a bland circle jerk to be honest but they kind of succeeded at making also X worse as there's less balance to those racist tweets etc.
- torben-friis 2y agoHas anyone managed to get a "functioning" tech discussion feed on bluesky? I tried not long ago, mostly help me get acquaintanced with the ruby ecosystem and news, but even using starter packs and the like the best I got was following devs that mostly talked about non tech stuff (personal life, politics and the like). Particularly annoying was the constant "we hate twitter" posts (I know, I'm here now, so why are we talking about them?). Also tons of anti AI clickbait.
- fastball 2y agoThat's just the state of devs these days.
- cheeseface 2y agoI follow people mostly from the JS/TS web development community and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between. I mostly the "mutuals" and "popular with friends" tabs to check things out. Every now and then there's too much US politics, but it's hard to escape nowadays.
- torben-friis 2y ago>and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between That's mostly what I want to avoid. Not that I'm not interested in humor, but I don't really care about the personal life of some random developer in the other side of the planet. I was just trying to get a RSS like, relatively context dense feed to substitute reddit and other similar sites. But I'm not sure it's doable in any current social network.
- kubav027 2y agoMy experience was the same but I wanted to get rust news. In my opinion social networks are failed concept because they want you to have one account for everything. They should encourage people to have multiple accounts for different audience. It is normal to talk about different things with friends, colleagues, family etc.
- psionides 2y ago
- bloopernova 2y agoMy experience with bsky.app is good so far. It's more like twitter was before 2015: I've had enjoyable conversations with a few different people, blocked some trolls, and discovered some new history books to read. The XBlock Screenshot Labeler moderation service has mostly kept the reposted screenshots to a minimum. When reporting a post you can choose which service to inform, so a screenshot would get reported to XBlock rather than the bsky.app mod team. https://bsky.app/profile/xblock.aendra.dev https://bsky.app/profile/xblock.aendra.dev I assume that more moderation services will get plugged in as the site grows. It's an interesting model/protocol/service.
- anal_reactor 2y ago1. The quality of pictures is lower than on Twitter, which I was using mostly for porn 2. Blocking someone prevents that person from even seeing your posts, which means that from the perspective of a lurker, it's best not to follow anyone, not to engage with anyone at all, not to make anyone aware of your existence, because 1% of people you follow will block you just because they're having a bad day 3. The Python client makes baby Jesus cry
- fatata123 2y ago[dead]
- DrBenCarson 2y ago1. Sorry for you 2. Don’t almost all blocks behave that way? Twitter’s always did. Seems Elon, in his infinite social acuity, has confused “block” with “mute?” Vast majority of users want to be able to actually “block” people 3. Baby Jesus cries very easily, he’s a baby
- anal_reactor 2y ago> Don’t almost all blocks behave that way? No > Baby Jesus cries very easily, he’s a baby I've never seen official baby Jesus merch with him crying
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lkrubner 2y agoThe success of Bluesky has been driven, in part, by the sophistication of their system for blocking. I know this is the main thing that draws me in. There are many people who, on a volunteer basis, build block lists that I can subscribe to. I've subscribed to many of these, more than 20, to block Nazis, scammers, MAGA, crypto bots, Russian trolls, fans of Elon Musk, racists, various political causes, and more. I've been planning to start my own list to block libertarians and anarchists. I hear other people complain about the bots on Bluesky, but I've seen very few bots on Bluesky, presumably because I subscribe to so many block lists. And I keep telling people: you can make all of the bots disappear, just subscribe to more block lists. And it's these block lists that have turned Bluesky into the most pleasant social media experience I've ever had.
- qwe----3 2y agoIf you post about an opinion against female athletes competing against trans women will that put you on the Nazi list?
- rsynnott 2y agoNah, here: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists/a-very-british-bigotry https://blueskydirectory.com/lists/a-very-british-bigotry This one in particular is a blessing; transphobes are a particularly _tedious_ (typically just parroting whatever Rowling or similar said this week) variety of bigot, and even before Musk Twitter was swarming with them.
- cmxch 2y agoWell, people want a sealed filter bubble. And BlueSky provides that.
- p3rls 2y agoSaw a bunch of people in my niche (music) on x.com say a few things about Musk and switch to Bluesky in protest. They came back within a week after they couldn't build an audience.
- nasvay_factory 2y agorecently I have deleted my account. format is not for me, too much fuss in my honest opinion
- AdmiralAsshat 2y agoAnd with that, I think the door on Mastodon gaining widespread adoption is closed forever. We had a very brief window when the Twitter Exodus was happening and non-techies were giving Mastodon a try. But it wasn't good enough, as far as giving the Twitter refugees what they wanted to see, and so they simply moved on to the nearest Twitter-With-The-Numbers-Filed-Off platform and stayed there instead. There's probably a good post-mortem study someone could do on this (someone more tuned in than me, since I never had a Twitter account to begin with), and the larger ramifications for why many of the FLOSS platforms fail to gain the adoption they think they will when the flagship proprietary platform becomes intolerable. cf: the failure of Windows 11 refugees to move to Linux, Chrome refugees to move to Firefox, etc.
- buyucu 2y agoI tried Mastodon twice, and got banned in both occasions for saying things mildly critical of Israel and Ukraine. Mastodon's biggest problem is the hyper-aggressive content moderation on the larger instances. Speaking about Mastodon's tech and UI, it's vastly superior to Bluesky. But they drive people away and then complain that people don't come.
- josephb 2y agoThe fediverse can be quite an echo chamber.
- kavenkanum 2y agoBut to be honest the UX of Mastodon is just unusable. Following someone is not a click on Follow button. It's the most basic feature I can think of. And it's complicated there. It just couldn't work. Bluesky just did it better.
- stiltzkin 2y ago[dead]
- Corrado 2y agoI agree that the UX of Mastodon was not the best. I tried several times to use it and it just never "clicked". Bluesky just worked for me, almost without trying. Maybe my problem with Mastodon was choosing the server to join. My brain knows that it's federated and it really doesn't matter which server you choose. However it always felt like I was choosing the wrong server somehow. Just that little bit of friction was enough to drive me away.
- jacobjjacob 2y agoTo be honest I wrote them off when they missed the first eXodus with their waitlist. I thought it was a Google+ moment. Luckily there were multiple exoduses which gave them second chances.
- starspangled 2y agoIs Bluesky considered better than X? Would it, for example, purport to keep us and our feelings safe by censoring those questioning an unproven and ultimately claim made by pharmaceutical corporations and politicians they donate money to, about the efficacy of their products?
- stiltzkin 2y ago[dead]