8mo ago

People are actually on BlueSky

There's now a decent measurement of #bluesky user numbers (https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bskyuserstotal.html) ...

They've got about 1.6M MAUs ...
& 0.8M Weekly unique users & 0.340M Daily.

That's not nothing!

Roughly double mastodon and 60% more than the whole fediverse (by MAUs, see fedidb.org).

Bluesky is quite "international" with large Japanese and Brazilian popltns, and there's real attrition happening IMO.

Still, let the protocol wars begin I suppose?

@fediverse

46 comments

It's crazy that people would rather migrate to a social media managed by a power hungry capitalist than to a "libre" platform
- Majority are not too techy to understand fediverse, nor they really care of the benefit decentralization provides.
- Because it's normal people instead of 100s of posts about Linux and thigh highs.
  
  LOL this is the answer. For better or worse, the Fediverse has a large established culture. I would not fault someone for trying out every possible alternative first.
- Is it really crazy? Most users don't give a shit about the tech or politics, they just want to go where the people they are interested in are, and most of them don't care either! Bluesky is actively promoting itself as the new old Twitter, so that's where people who want that are going.
- I have a mastodon and honestly, it's hardly a replacement. different instances are far too isolated even when federating together. Finding user accounts is difficult, and basic stuff like seeing content on another instance is needlessly kneecapped compared to other ActivityPub stuff like Lemmy.
- Fediverse isn't intuitive
- Most people dont give a fuck. They just want something better than X and popular. "Power hungry capitalism" doesn't even cross their minds.
  
  I agree, but I think it does cross the minds of many. They just still choose not to care.
- It's unfortunate, but regular people don't want to learn about new things and just want one platform where everybody is, basically "Twitter without Musk".

Bluesky is twitter. All the issues we have with X now are bound to happen with bluesky when it gets relevant.
The fediverse is the only viable alternative.
- Bluesky is part of the fediverse. Isn't it?
  
  They don't speak the same language as Lemmy and Mastodon, so can't really federate with anyone else at the moment

@maegul @fediverse I find BlueSky to be a lot more diverse and also far better for news than Mastodon. But at the same time it's a nastier and more superficial place.
- @Loukas @fediverse
  Comparatively, it's definitely a lot more into shitposting vibes, for sure.
  I think their biggest problem right now is they don't have good community self-organising features (nor masto, but the boost culture corrects for that IMO), so those who want more serious sub-cultures aren't getting much footing (and may never).
  Feeds are interesting but not very fruitful IMO and hashtags are new, so it's a bit flat community-wise there, and many users are "wait & see" I suspect.
  
  @maegul @fediverse The lack of community tools might be the biggest technical gap, but the real problem is a lack of communities who want to use either.
  Because of this, I think both Mastodon and BlueSky have hit their highwater marks under current conditions and no technical changes can alter that.
  A million each is enough to survive and stagnate but it doesn't enable growth. Only some major antitrust action against Meta by EU could do that :)

@maegul @fediverse people are actually on twitter
- @anderseknert @fediverse
  LOL ... yea plenty right.
  
  @maegul @fediverse 😄
  I do wish for the Fediverse to grow though, and to include more groups from all over the world. But I feel done with corporate social media, regardless of their MAUs.

@maegul @fediverse Bluesky appears to be just a creative way to build a bird site without Moskhos ie indexing and proprietary open source code, & little blueskies within bluesky- if it becomes successful it can’t be long before litigation. Federations are only as good as the people who live there - little moderation means parts of X are like Zombie City - I like it here people are mostly warm, funny, unique, intelligent & reasonably tolerant of each others eccentricities.

Is blue sky part of the fediverse?
- No
- I thought they had plans to at one point? Maybe misremembering
  
  Their federation protocol was called ActivityTrack, which is different than ActivityPub that much of the Fediverse uses. There were some efforts to host relays that translate between the two protocols but some people got upset that their data is being accessed and processed in order to do that.

@maegul @fediverse
but afaik they aren't effectively decentralized yet. might as well use Twitter.
- Yup. they "decentralised" servers for hosting profile info but it's still totally centralised for receiving and sending posts.

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