Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²
Bluesky doesn’t have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million
Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can’t confirm it
Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹
Source:
Tried it last night for a hockey game. I still think I’m not using it correctly but people were nice.
There’s no right or wrong way. For it to be fun for an event like that you need to follow lots of people in that space. Like journalist, reporters, beat writers and analysts. However if you don’t want that content in your feed full time you could try searching one of the teams hashtags and use the latest tab to follow along. You can also take all those suggested follows and make a list to pin to your BlueSky front page without following them and just goto that feed during games.
Oh interesting, thanks! I figured out the hashtaga bit but a lot of fun popped up without the hashtaga etc.
I suppose I’ll just keep muddling along and figure something that works for me while trying to be a net positive influence!
30 million users and still nobody likes my posts
Whenever I see how they keep getting brought up, I’m always reminded of that Dilbert ep about how people just fall for blue logos that are easy on the eyes. They don’t even have to know what it is… just the fact that the stupid logo is blue is enough. lol
Can I get the icon in cornflower blue? https://youtu.be/4NomQYQK1bE
I find it odd that people follow Jack Dorsey into another sewer in troves. They seem to like the previous Twitter experiment, while I find it repugnant.
The lesson today is that I don’t get the social media phenomenon. My bad. I hope they have a ton of fun.
Jack Dorsey is not part of Bluesky, maybe you don’t get things because you don’t pay attention.
I didn’t like Twitter as a social platform, but I did use it a lot for news on current events, such as how is the traffic on my route home, and why am I stuck in traffic, and how many miles ahead of me is the fucking accident?
Handy for communication during some kind of emergency that floods the phone network, but that’s pretty niche. Anyway, I interact a little on Bluesky but mostly it’s just a time killer like TikTok or whatever. Twitter was super easy to quit between the Musk take over and moving away from DC.
such as how is the traffic on my route home, and why am I stuck in traffic, and how many miles ahead of me is the fucking accident
Any maps app, especially Google Maps, would do this as well.
Eh… what I really wanted to know was when they are going to clear the wreck and whether that stupid mother fucker died so I shouldn’t flip them off as I drive by. Can Google Maps tell me that?
I didn’t really want to out myself as the asshole wishing for someone’s death. But here we are.
He’s already gone. But, regardless, why sign up for yet another corporate social media site when every single one of them becomes enshittified after a few years. Are they just planning to abandon Bluesky eventually too? Or just hoping that this time it’s different?
You say that as if any Mastodon instance was guaranteed to last several years.
The difference is that you can easily move to another Mastodon instance, and it’s designed so that when you do that your followers / followees come with you.
Except you can’t move your posts. Or, really, anything other than followers.
True, and this is something that Bluesky actually seems to do better. Your posts are stored in a “PDS” (personal data store), so in theory they’re not tied to any particular instance.
I hope that a future version of the Fediverse design / ActivityPub considers how to handle this issue. Still, I’d much rather lose my past posts than lose my social graph. Past posts can probably be archived, but it’s much harder to track down people you used to be mutuals with on a different account and follow each-other.
Jack Dorsey has no involvement in Bluesky. He doesnt even have a Bluesky account.
He was the founder… I did not know he had left.
Good with some competition. We need much more in that area.
why are people frothing over Bluesky? this is just Twitter but owned by a different oligarch
They have an addiction to that kind of socials.
No clue. Never found those platforms to be useful, just toxic.
Same here… even when Twitter was not even in the sights of fElon I found it to be super toxic. I signed up because “it was the best way to get the news” and left in about 4 days
Because it isn’t just Twitter. Nobody can buy the network, the same way nobody can buy email.
- Anyone can host a server.
- Anyone can make an app.
- Anyone can make an algorithm.
- Anyone can make a moderation service. Users can freely pick a server, app, algorithm, and moderation service.
Yeah, no, not anybody can host a server. Sure, you can host a PDS, but the AppView still wasn’t open source last time I looked, and hosting a relay requires tens of terabytes of storage, not to mention the bandwidth to keep up.
Meanwhile, people host actual activitypub instances on repurposed routers and their car entertainment system…
Ngl thanks for the detail, I went and had another look so correct me if I’m wrong.
- Anyone can host a open source PDS like the Bluesky PDS.
- Anyone can make an AppView to view these PDSs.
- Someone with many resources needs to host a relay.
- Also it seems that Bluesky is able to gatekeep access to its federation of PDSs on a per AppView basis? The details are a bit confusing.
So if we wanted to undermine Bluesky’s currently - hopefully temporary - centralised state, we would need multiple community modified PDSs, a widely rehosted open source AppView webapp & iOS/Android clients, a very expensive relay that is community controlled via non profit or something, and then we would be federated with each other and the bluesky infrastructure too?
Sounds like a lot of work just to recreate the user-end functionality of ActivityPub :/ Very confused why they felt the need to invent ATProtocol? I have heard some vague praise of it over AP but I think I’m not technical enough to really properly make that comparison. It’s nice that ATProtocol gives you ownership of your data though.
Perhaps Mastodon/ActivityPub-apps need to improve their onboarding process and user experience. Maybe include the custom feeds feature for Bluesky too. Something has to have gone wrong for Mastodon to have failed where Bluesky succeeded.
Because they learned nothing
Yeah, why would I use BlueSky when I could just use my favorite platform named Threads?
Tap for spoiler
Just kidding
Try hosting your own instance and sorting through the content of 30m people for the one post you want. lol
This is so true. It costs more money for the server power required for something like that to be pulled off.
There’s a comment in this thread going all crazy complaining about it being costly to host anything on the protocol to stop Bluesky from dominating it and everything. But im like “uhh yeah, servers and storage costs money”.
It’s just so weird how everyone thinks hosting popular sites should be free.
Something similar is going to happen with lemmy if reddit keeps caving in to Elon
Na, we are a reduct… it’s a miracle we are on indexed web*
*/j
Man, people love Left wing Gab.
The need to give everything a political stance these days is maddening and IMO very divisive.
When Bluesky was first launched in February 2023, it was an invite-only beta that required an invite code to register. Several prominent influencers and celebrities, including Breadtuber Twitch streamers were given referral codes to share with their audience. As a result, these codes were kept within these leftist spheres. So the user base is mainly Left wing. All I’m doing is calling spade a spade.
Oh it’s very left, the whole open web seems to lean that way. I just find it silly and not much different from what they claim right wing platforms to be. When I go out into the world social spaces aren’t left or right and for the most part we all get a long cordially. Bad eggs notwithstanding.
Is this 30 million accounts created? Active user numbers would be a lot more meaningful.
As an illustration, if you have a platform that’s gaining 100,000 users each month and losing 100,000 other users each month, it’s basically going nowhere. But it will eventually reach this “30 million users” milestone too if all it means is account creations.
I wonder how many of the 30 million accounts are bots.
Active user numbers is probably less than 1 million, but still, 30 million accounts created is quite likely pretty good.
It’s something, but there’s really no frame of reference to know if it’s good or how good. Because companies rarely talk about this number. Twitter might have billions of accounts created if we look at all time.
Actives are what count.
I’ve come to realize that bluesky already had all lot of what I’m happy to not see on masto. Good that there is a place for it to exist without me.
That content is also probably what the majority of people like about it.
Man does not learn
6 more months before it monetizes…
Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.
To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.
It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.
They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).
I feel like the reason the reason why it’s taking off so much is because it’s not federated.
It’s like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it’s not that simple but still.
In other words, people don’t know what they actually need.
I don’t think 99% of people who have joined bluesky have any clue what federation is or means. They do know what “not twitter” is however.
I don’t personally think it’s because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but… everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren’t averse to federation, in concept or practice.
Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter’s UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.
“Bluesky” feels like a breath of fresh air, while “Mastodon” just sounds like… well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.
So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?
Exactly, it’s just packaged in a way that consumers are more familiar with with the backing of major celebs
Its also, honestly, just really hard to find people on Mastodon.
People are not afraid of the term “Federation.“ They literally have no clue what it is.
It’s the instance concept I find consistently to be an issue. It’s an extra layer/barrier to entry. You don’t just create an account. You have to understand what an instance is and then determine which one you’re joining and what that means for your moment to moment usage of the platform.
Yeah I was confused on if it was connected, if I was explaining it to myself id say that the fediverse has interconnected forums that all serve the same content and can be accessed by making accounts on different websites or apps.
Lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected forum/threads side of the fediverse.
Mastodon, sharkey, plaroma, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected microblogging slide of the fediverse.
They all have different features, like mbin has account reputation, piefed has topics which let you sub to multiple related communities at once, etc., but the content is shared between those that serve the same type of content.
Since they’re all built ontop of the same protocol ppl can always come in and build on top of it or make hybrids while still letting everyone access the same content. Like mbin having both microblogging (tweets) and threads, letting you post and view both from the same account/website.
And it legit takes 5 minutes to sign up for 5 instances and see the differences, mine showed the same content for the most part, only lemmy.world was missing the piracy community, other than that it was all the same and any nervousness I had about it went away after seeing the feeds being the same.
Yeah but people don’t want to set up 5 accounts to understand alt-reddit. They want to download a clean app that takes seconds to set up and just go. Friction is friction.
Not everyone likes to tinker and poke and prod
they should understand by the 2nd one, I just wasnt sure where I wanted to commit, it became fun by the 2nd one to pick an instance like a club
Not only do I don’t mind multiple instances, I welcome it. It’s a feature for me, not a bug. But having to create multiple accounts is a no-no and what keeps people away. People say you only need one but that’s not true if you want to be active in multiple instances.
If the fediverse had a way to unify account creation, that would be a game changer. It’s pretty much what’s holding the fediverse down, be it Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc. It’s frustrating because without that limitation I could see the corpos being given a run for their money.
I think maybe I mis-conveyed my point. I love the way this is all structured. The problem is that it is not accessible to laymen at first glance. I tried the “it’s like email” approach and people’s eyes still just glaze over. They want to download an app, create their account, and jump into the action. Anything beyond that requires a lot of buy-in unless they are already somewhat technically inclined.
As I said in another comment, I find the simplest thing to do is just set up the account for them, pick out an instance for them and tell them what it is, and then once they’ve stuck it out and get their bearings then open the door a little wider and explain Federation, the nature of different instances, etc. My only goal is just to get them on at all.
there really isnt much friction either if you dont cate about piracy otherwise id have stayed on lemmyworld when vyjr reccomended it, they really just need to try it, I complained until I tried it
But even then you have to explain the whole subscribed vs local vs all situation. Then defederation, so they know that there is stuff they can’t access without creating another account on another instance.
No matter how much we simplify it it’s simply not that simple. At least not compared to traditional social media. And we can sit here and call them lazy for not learning how it works or we can do more to try to meet people where they’re at.
What I’ve been doing lately is pointing people a good app like Voyager, tell them not even to think about an instance and just join the one I tell them to join (For instance I tell my queer friends to join blahaj), then as they poke around I started explain explaining more things.
It’s kind of like Linux. People obsess over their first distro and then they realize it’s really easy to swap distro’s. So usually I just tell people to get something very simple like mint or pop and just dive in until they learn what they actually want.
The only thing the Fediverse is missing is way to migrate from 1 instance to another
It actually does exist, at least on Mastodon, but is still very janky (e.g. old posts aren’t moved over due to “technical limitations”)
Automatically makes people unfollow your old account and re-follow your new account, then makes your old instance’s link redirect to your new instance’s one.
Ah yes, “free our feeds” where millionaire VCs are asking for donations
This is such a half-assed dog and pony show.
They have millions in investment, why do they need someone else to fund this? Why don’t the bluesky team directly and materially support them?
This is a core aspect of Bluesky’s marketing and they asking other volunteers to help make them rich.
Until there’s overt advertising its unlikely to enshittify the normal way. That doesn’t mean it won’t, just that a different capital process is at work. Wikipedia has outlived most of “web2.0” because its funded by donations and run by volunteers.
Until there’s overt advertising its unlikely to enshittify the normal way.
Trust me we will be deep into that territory so fast it is going to make your head spin.
Wikipedia has outlived most of “web2.0” because its funded by donations and run by volunteers.
Private equity and VC funding can’t directly buy Wikipedia and dissect it because it is an at least somewhat functional non-profit organization. That is the only reason.
What would a comparable example be?
Twitter
Twitter was ad driven and was enshittifying before musk bought it, and sold because they were a public company.
Jay Graber will likely get bored and sell it off or monetize eventually but twitter is definitely not the model here.
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