this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024

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Bluesky crosses the 15 million user mark (www.theverge.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Bluesky’s latest signup surge continues.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Bluesky: 15,128,928
Mastodon: 15,499,978

Source: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats and https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount

These numbers are to taken with a grain of salt. Mastodon in example can't count all instances, because not all are federated. Also on both instances we don't have numbers of active users per day or logged in at the same time. However Bluesky provides statistics beyond just the number of accounts. I'm not saying one is better or has more active users than the other, only that the total number of accounts can be misleading as much as the Megapixels count of your camera.

Edit: I forgot there is another statistics displaying the number of active users for Mastodon: above 2.5 million users. Also it displays current Mastodon user count less than 10 million. Again either it counts it differently or it does not have access to the same instances as the other account has. Source: https://mastodon-analytics.com/

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Good. Still not completely sure about moving from one corporate site to another, but good to see more and more people are moving away from Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

On one hand i love to see people fleeing Twitter, on another i think it foolish to move to another corporate site that eventually WILL enshittify. Here's Cory Doctorow on why he won't join Bsky or Threads

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Bluesky Social is a public benefit corporation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Like OpenAI?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

That doesn't mean much unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (2 children)

At least BlueSky is built on a technology based on open standard protocol and is decentralized. Kind of similar to the goals of Fediverse / Mastodon. So I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky? I don't know if this is possible. But in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.

My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse, so it becomes read from and write to relationship.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

is decentralized

It's not.

I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky?

They can't.

in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.

...yep.

My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse.

ActivityPub existed before BlueSky did and they chose to make their own, incompatible thing. So I don't have high hopes for this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Well its possible to have a bridge system, like its possible with Discord and Matrix. So from technical standpoint, I think it would be possible, unless they choose to not.

As for the centralized vs decentralized, BlueSky uses the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol , which is decentralized. If you do not agree to this, then do you have an explanation to why?

Edit: Funny enough I read this AT_Protocl is Based on ActivityPub, according to the Wikipedia article.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

My impression is that AT_Protocol lends itself to decentralized computing resources moreso than decentralized control or authority.

In the fediverse, instance owners have pretty strong control over their instance, the content it hosts, the people who can use it, etc. Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.

The key difference, to me, is that if someone doesn't like how the main Mastodon instances are running, they can make their own and have a completely separate network from those bad actors without rebuilding the world. With Bluesky, there's not really any exit door like that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.

This is what I don't understand, why would anyone choose to host when there is zero advantage? I sort of feel is by design so they can claim "decentralized" while still having full control over the data.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

i, for one. ain't one of those 15 million users nor am i likely to ever be

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

And that's why I like Bridgy Fed, I don't really like BlueSky neither (except nuclear block), but thanks to the bridge I can still interact with my friends from my Fediverse accounts, something that wouldn't be possible with Twitter for example

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I signed up and made a post. I was shocked and then amused when somebody actually saw my post?! It made me realize I don't understand how to even use a Twitter type of social media. Do I just post my thoughts? What's up with that lol

I always just used Twitter as a way to see youtubers/streamers updates

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

It can be hard to bootstrap yourself up from zero followers. I'd recommend posting something just so that people have an idea of the kind of thing they can expect if they follow you from checking out your profile. But you probably won't get much engagement from your own posts at first, so it will probably be more fun to just reply to other accounts.

Bluesky has a feature where you can set up customized feeds to filter for any kind of content you want. The person who saw your post might have seen it in the "newskies" feed which just contains every first post that any account makes for example. So one way to get engagement can be to write posts that show up in a certain feed that people follow, like there exist some feeds that are based around certain topics that usually trigger based on your post containing certain keywords. Most people just use the following feed though, I think.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I’ve never used Twitter and have no interest in social media but I signed up for Bluesky because I have hated Twitter for 15 years. Also I appreciate that Bluesky has almost no data collection and no tracking. That’s cool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Enshittification Stage 1 is ALWAYS sweet, but eventually ends

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yea, it's also open source, so that's cool

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Mostly, yes. The decentralized identity system is not.

My fear with Bsky is even though it’s open source we’ll still just end up with one large VC funded company controlling the one big instance everyone uses and then enshittification begins.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

For now

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You can also now browse without an account on bluesky which is neat

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Not NSFW content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I'm wondering if that's more for legal reasons than for technical ones. Then again, I'm not a lawyer, and you could probably get around it by directly using the AT Protocol.

shrugs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Does it still require SMS verification? Or was that lifted? That's where I stopped my out-of-interest signup last time.

/edit: It does not anymore. But my handle is taken now. :(