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Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app
- maelito 2mo agoHow are the X figures computed ? Bluesky is a public network, anyone can analyse and count. What about X, held by Musk ?
- dijit 2mo agoWould be hard to gauge, X has a major bot problem, which Musk made big claims about combating but yet has failed to yield realistic results...
- AmericanOP 2mo agoElon bought X for the bot problem, not because of it.
- vachina 2mo agoIt has improved a lot since the acquisition. Before the bot purge X was basically crypto shillers or scammers. X now actually feels more organic than, Facebook. Sometimes I see content on X before they eventually gets reposted on Reddit.
- Hugsbox 2mo agoYou cannot be serious. On the rare occasion that I do open it up for whatever reason, I'm immediately stunned by the cesspit that greets me. I refuse to believe that's not like 90% bots.
- vachina 2mo ago[flagged]
- Hugsbox 2mo agoIt would be the "being bots" that makes them bots. I know there's some nutcases out there, but not enough of them to fill a twitter-sized insane asylum, and I'm talking about accounts that make statements at both ends of the political spectrum. You spend about 2 minutes on there and nearly every post or comment you read leaves you thinking "there's absolutely no way a real, living, breathing person wrote this", unless you yourself are an absolute lunatic or very gullible. It's downright baffling.
- amiga386 2mo agoThat's really on you. There are (according to Wikidata) 259,000+ verified notable humans, who have Wikipedia articles about them, who have their own Twitter handles. Here are some of them: https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Fitem%20%3FtwitterHandle%20%3FitemLabel%20%3FitemDescription%20WHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20%23%20is%20a%20human%0A%20%20%3Fitem%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ5%20.%0A%20%20%23%20with%20a%20twitter%20handle%0A%20%20%3Fitem%20wdt%3AP2002%20%3FtwitterHandle%20.%0A%0A%20%20SERVICE%20wikibase%3Alabel%20%7B%20bd%3AserviceParam%20wikibase%3Alanguage%20%22en%22.%20%7D%0A%7D%0ALIMIT%20100 https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Fitem%20%3FtwitterHan... That doesn't mean they post regularly, but it's more than enough real humans to follow (so that they can retweet bot crap at you)
- hocuspocus 2mo agoI assume you don't use Twitter, otherwise you'd have noticed that annoying bots are in the replies.
- EA-3167 2mo agoI hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach. Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoWhat does success look like? I get what I want from Twitter/X through a pull through cache. I get to read the folks I follow on Bluesky. Works for me? My feed as a utility is working as expected. I keep what I want to read, and mute and block that which I do not. I remain in control of my data and experience of the firehose. If someone I'd like to see on Bluesky is not yet there, I ask them to be. If there is data on Bluesky not yet there but that might have value to others, I pipe it in via a PDS and pub sub automation. How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded. Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw) (Threads is always there for the normies until it enshittifies and Meta chases whatever catches Mark's eye next)
- speak_plainly 2mo agoI think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure. But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
- frozenseven 2mo agoInteresting quote: "For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities." Code: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto Website: https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/
- dbbk 2mo agoIf Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
- jimmydoe 2mo agoMeta's ActivityPub is very fake, it's not only off by default and functionally limited, but also has a dark pattern to get you turn it off. It would be the same if they do ATP.
- Karrot_Kream 2mo agoNothing is stopping you from building your own AP algorithm either though, right? An "algorithm" is, ultimately, a ranking model that ranks a set of incoming posts based on some criteria no? Nothing stops someone from building their own ranking model for themselves. I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
- singpolyma3 2mo agoAnything on AP or AT can bridge both ways anyway
- nailer 2mo agoThreads indeed could have used AT protocol to bootstrap Threads audence, but it's likely that a corporate sponsor would not want their brand associated with Bluesky's audience.
- blakesterz 2mo agoToni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneider-interview-ai-atproto-atmosphere https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...
- jimmydoe 2mo agothere's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky. people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.
- edoceo 2mo agoIs there a different timeline?
- nxm 2mo agoTwitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
- ChicagoDave 2mo ago80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents. I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
- waterheater 2mo agoThe real percentage of bots on X is a baseline of 10% and can quadruple around contentious topics; see: https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/ https://www.clickguard.com/blog/twitter-spam-bots/ Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
- halyconWays 2mo agoThe only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
- omoikane 2mo agoMaybe Bluesky is not quite the Twitter rival it set out to be, but it's got a better shot than Mastodon, according to the user count graphs here: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://mastodon-analytics.com/ https://mastodon-analytics.com/ Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
- tptacek 2mo agoThe distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.
- singpolyma3 2mo agoWe already have others running infrastructure as well so if bsky goes away the platform can survive
- captainbland 2mo agoWill it though? Where mastodon is much more distributed, bluesky/ATProto use is highly concentrated on bsky.app
- mrbn100ful 2mo agoATProto needs bluesky to survive. The only source of truth is hosted by bluesky https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1892 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1892 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2821 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2821
- cdrnsf 2mo agoWe have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
- tptacek 2mo agoSure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's not one platform. It's a set of independent platforms that sometimes federate. The M/AP federation experience is a third-class experience. Cool kids don't federate, they're already on the server with the people they talk to.
- TMWNN 2mo agoReddit is dominated by the left, but there are other voice audible. Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account. There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky. "JD Vance Becomes Most Blocked Person on BlueSky Days After Joining App" <https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-bluesky-blocked-social-media-2088432 https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-bluesky-blocked-social-med...> Even Bluesky's top users say so. "Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the 'lack of diversity of thought' is actually pushing users back to X" <https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/bluesky-backfiring-mark-cuban-lack-of-diversity-of-thought-x-users/ https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/bluesky-backfiring-mark-cuban...> "Bluesky is not the good place" <https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replacement https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replace...> But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link, >This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game. That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.
- wookmaster 2mo agoHuh I had no idea this is happening my entire feed is just photographers lol
- vachina 2mo agoBasically Bluesky is an echo chamber.
- Bluescreenbuddy 2mo ago
- raincole 2mo agoBluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky. The funniest part is that there is a better algorithm. It's right here: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-you https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-... But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
- PaulHoule 2mo agoIf you are careful about who you follow and you click on “less like this” whenever you see hysterical stuff about politics the “discover” feed is pretty good, in fact back when I was concerned about this I found it has 30% as much hysterical stuff about politics as my “following” feed.
- ChiperSoft 2mo agoUntil your thumb slips while trying to hit the dots, the post gets focused, and now you're spending the next three hours telling the algorithm to stop showing you diaper kink artwork because it thinks you must be into that since you looked closer at it. Almost as bad as tiktok repeatedly showing you promos for the same product because you didn't swipe away in less than five seconds.
- echelon 2mo agoI don't want to see politics, rage bait, sexism, hate, performative superiority, whining, or negativity. Who invented all of these algorithms? I want none of this. I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
- singpolyma3 2mo agoThen follow people producing such content?
- ecshafer 2mo agoBluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
- brooke2k 2mo agocalling elon musk "a Republican" is such a wild understatement
- jryle70 2mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mexicocitinluez 2mo agolol So stating a fact means you're more likely to be on Bluesky? Sign me up. As long as it's not run by a guy who is so pathetic he lies about the video games he plays.
- jryle70 2mo agoI'm sure you'll find it home right there
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoYeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.
- semiquaver 2mo agoAs an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X. It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
- PaulHoule 2mo agoA lot of people on Bluesky are pretty normal and if you make a point to block on the first bit of political NPC behavior you can find people that are interested in cat pictures and software and such.
- BeetleB 2mo agoI find it interesting that most conversations about Twitter or Bluesky is about the "political vibe". Why is that so important? On Mastodon, if someone keeps posting political stuff to the point where it's a big chunk of my feed, I merely unfollow. As a result my feed has very little politics. Can't you simply do that on Bluesky? Of course, if you actively want politics, but want just the right kind of politics, then you've dug yourself into a hole.
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- jillesvangurp 2mo ago> it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there. You are describing X here. It kind of turned into a very toxic political platform. The exodus to Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky happened for a good reason. After Elon Musk took over it didn't exactly improve. I'm on still on X, and on Bluesky and Mastodon. For my network of perfectly normal people, most of them did not delete their X account but just aren't very active there any more. Quite a few showed up on Bluesky in the last year or so (30-40%) and some also on Mastodon (~20%). But that just leaves a long tail of random accounts I followed on Twitter that I don't really miss that much. Many of them have gone silent in any case. I actually don't mind Bluesky. I pretty much ignore algorithmic feeds and just consume content from people I happen to follow in the order it is published. If what you see is blue-haired loonies, might I suggest following less of those. Organizing people in lists is helpful as well. Mostly the people I follow are the same people I used to follow on X. Their political leanings didn't really change and they still talk about the same kinds of topics. It's just that the noise of random nut bags that I wasn't following to begin with dominating my X feed is completely gone. I don't miss that at all.
- slashdave 2mo agoCan someone pretty please create a decent alternative to X?
- inigyou 2mo agoNo. Bluesky tried. But it's not "a decent alternative" - why not?
- eterm 2mo agoI wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting. I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things. It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.
- delecti 2mo agoWhen was this? Other than posts from official the Bluesky account (bsky.app) my feed is roughly 0% about Bluesky itself. There was more discussion about Bluesky itself early on, when the contrast with Twitter was more topical. And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.
- eterm 2mo agoPerhaps it's the crowd I've followed and I've fallen down a niche, but I keep getting pushed threads such as this: https://bsky.app/profile/palle.eurosky.social/post/3msirglffys2l https://bsky.app/profile/palle.eurosky.social/post/3msirglff... And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me. It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper. And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount. There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! ) Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.
- jamilton 2mo ago
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoBluesky is a buggy borderline nonfunctional mess. The fediverse does literally everything better than it. Bluesky by comparison is completely inferior and redundant.
- AnonHP 2mo agoMy experience is different. I like the chronological feeds and the lists I can create to group accounts.
- maelito 2mo agoWhat ? I have no bugs on bluesky for years.
- moritzruth 2mo agoI had the exactly opposite experience. I'm even selfhosting my own (non-reference implementation) PDS, and going in I was fully expecting to encounter weird consistency issues, but there were none at all.
- archagon 2mo agoThis thread is primed for shitting on Bluesky, but the level of discourse among the people I follow has only grown over the past few years. In no way does it feel like a dying platform. (Same for Mastodon, actually.)
- Bluescreenbuddy 2mo agoYou can tell who here doesn't use bluesky. They're self reporting. It's like going to chicago, seeing a homeless person act crazy, then leaving and telling everyone that it's a crime ridden shit hole. They're just parroting the same shit everyone else who's never used it are parroting
- hamburglar 2mo agoI notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?
- SoKamil 2mo agoIn fact, this is the same codebase as Bluesky uses react-native-web.
- icantevenhold 2mo agoYou aren’t logged in on the browser when you use it?
- bulder 2mo agoThe figures used don't count browser users at all, signed in or not
- icantevenhold 2mo agoWeird why not? I can’t read the article due to some nightmarish anti Adblock software they use wtf
- testbjjl 2mo agoSo you didn’t read the article, made an assumption about its content, question someone who did, then blame Adblock for your confusion, instead of just following the conversation?
- icantevenhold 2mo agoNo I was confused that they wouldn’t count the browser users when there is no good reason to when they try to eval their user base? MAU commonly includes web users as well. I blame TechCrunch for creating a website that I can’t read but yea fair criticism I didn’t read the article. I didn’t question GP i asked if they knew why web users aren’t counted. Do they explain in the article why they would only count mobile users as MAU?
- ModernMech 2mo agoI tried Bluesky after Threads because the ads were getting to me. I reposted one picture of my favorite bird, the albatross, and then my feed was 100% bird pictures. I'm not interested in birds generally, just albatrosses specifically. But they were nice enough pictures so I kept using the app. Then I tried telling it about my other interest which was robotics, and so I started liking posts about autonomous cars. Specifically, one day I liked a picture of some guy filming in in his car some other guy sleeping in his Tesla while it was driving autonomously on the highway. After that my feed was flooded with selfies of dudes in their car. Like, "goodmorning sunshine, off to work, here's a quick selfie of me". Every time I opened the app it was just a parade of bird pictures and selfies of bearded dudes in their cars. At least on Threads the thirst traps were thirsty! Bluesky had no idea what my interests were. On Threads we used to do a thing like "Hey @algorithm, send me people who are interested in X Y Z" and that worked. Actually first it didn't and then Threads made it official after so many people did it. But even still when it wasn't official it still seemed Threads was able to provide a better feed than Bluesky. So I quit. Congrats Bluesky, tough feat but you've somehow found a way to be more annoying than ads.
- renegade-otter 2mo agoThese algorithms are supposed to be helping me discover new interests, but instead they make me cautious about what I click on. I watch two seconds of some video I ultimately don't care for and then get my feed chockfull of THAT shit forever. I so miss the days when the Internet was more random. It's not really nostalgia - it WAS better.
- ModernMech 2mo agoSeems these days you can't even linger too long on a feed item or they flag your interest in it.
- stephen_g 2mo agoI tried Threads a tiny bit but its algorithm seemed obsessed with trying to rage-bait me. Like I get that it is one way to drive engagement but everything was just bad takes about my interests with lots of replies correcting them… It was never an enjoyable platform to use because of that. I ended up finding a good group of people to follow on Mastodon so didn’t end up even trying Bluesky (although I do follow some accounts from there through the bridge)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 2mo agoI’ve come to think there’s no “better” social media. People just seem to leave social media entirely.
- yen223 2mo agoThe numbers seem to support the premise that people are leaving text-based social media. TikTok and YouTube are still growing, while Reddit, Facebook, X and the rest are stagnant or shrinking
- pessimizer 2mo agoBluesky's active user base has never not been shrinking, no matter what they were focusing on. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideological, which is why its boosters sound like evangelists. This is just media promotion, hopefully to bump up user numbers for a week or two, but really so the people who work at the VC firms that put money into this dog have something to show to their bosses.
- afavour 2mo ago> It's entire life is due to lib slactivism I'd disagree with that, I'd say its entire life is due to the shittifying of Twitter. People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like and (after trying and not being satisfied with Mastodon) it's the next best thing. The problem is that a social network of this kind relies on having a large enough population to feel "live" and Bluesky has never got there. There have been glimmers of hope... during the NBA finals and the World Cup Bluesky felt like a genuine destination for live sports. But it might be too little too late.
- pessimizer 2mo agoI agree (in a way), but I don't think that people who went to Bluesky were trying to recreate twitter, they were trying to silence twitter. The past they are pining for was a past when people they didn't like weren't allowed to speak, and they were hoping (in a non-userlike, political way) that bluesky would threaten twitter, and force it to behave in the way that they preferred or to shut down. Then they would all be able to go back to the ideologically-pruned twitter of their dreams, or twitter would go bankrupt (the bankruptcy narratives were endless) and everyone would move to bluesky. They were hoping that twitter would go the way of Digg. It's very similar to the fantasy that they had about Reddit after the API shutdown. Slacktivism. The fact that twitter is as active as ever is why they slink back. I'd bet 90% of actives on bluesky also have twitter accounts that are more active. Twitter didn't care when they walked away; in fact it was a relief. A great many of them were extreme trolls and reply guys who spent the rest of their time mass-reporting people for disagreeing with them. And for the few people who thought of this as the p2p answer to twitter (an obsession among programming p2p nerds - including me - for a long time) it has to be a disappointment that the company obviously has no intention of relinquishing control of a thing.
- inanothertime 2mo ago> Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app Are they implying a causal relationship between their shrinking user base and their focus expansion? The article doesn't give any proof whatsoever.
- 6031769 2mo agoNo they aren't. All they are doing is pointing out a temporal correlation. Inference of causality is left to the whim of the reader.
- mikhmha 2mo agoThere are too many bots on BlueSky. Atleast in the niche I post within (game development). There are lots of automated accounts out there meant to like, repost, and signal boost. I appreciate the gesture but when all your engagement comes from these accounts it’s frustrating. I don’t want retweets and likes, I want people to engage with what I post. Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.
- gota 2mo ago> Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? I don't think there's anything other than - there are more people on twitter; due to first mover advantage and inertia
- jghn 2mo agoConcern about engagement is IMO the root cause issue going all the way back to Twitter. Somewhere around 10 years ago people started focusing on "engagement" instead of just interacting with people organically. Worrying about how to improve their engagement. Not wanting to post on a site if they didn't good engagement. How to monetize engagement. And so on. Twitter was at its best when it was just a bunch of people figuring out what the fuck it was in the first place. Posting into the ether. Responding to random strangers. Chatting with friends. Whatever. These sites need less focus on driving engagement, less tools to direct attention to one's post, and more of a focus on organic posting.
- kuramori 2mo agoSo maybe far left echo chamber as a service is not that good of a business model after all. But then there’s Reddit.
- goatlover 2mo agoDefine "far left". In comparison to MAGA? The Overton window of the US has shifted so far right that universal healthcare and free education are seen as one step removed from communism.
- oseityphelysiol 2mo agoThe article is about Bluesky, but what I find hard to believe is that Threads has almost twice the MAU compared to X?.. I’ve never met a person that uses Threads in any capacity. Never even heard anyone mention about anything on Threads. Are these numbers skewed somehow?
- xethos 2mo agoI'd expect it to be cross-pollination from Instagram being tied to Threads
- trashface 2mo agoI suspect Meta just counts every Instagram user as a Threads user
- yen223 2mo agoX was popular but never had that many users, not even back in the Twitter days. This is a big part of why Twitter was so easily acquired.
- ksec 2mo agoBecause they are regional specifics, twitter or X is only big in some countries like US and Japan. Threads is doing what twitter should have done but for the rest of the world who didn't jump onto twitter.
- fleroviumna 2mo ago[dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2mo agoBluesky's problem isn't technical, it's all about network effects. I begrudgingly read twitter because everyone I follow is on twitter. Bluesky is far more pleasant to use too!
- browningstreet 2mo agoThey need to solve the “bluesky” vs “bsky” destination search patterns on desktop and mobile.