Bluesky Crosses the 15 Million User Mark (theverge.com) 36
Bluesky has reached 15 million users, driven by a recent surge in U.S. signups following the presidential election. It's currently the top free app on iOS. The Verge reports: The platform, which rests on the decentralized AT Protocol, added about a million new users in the last week. Bluesky COO Rose Wang recently told The Verge that the "majority" of new users flocking to the platform have been from the US. Meta's Threads is still outpacing Bluesky, having recently hit 275 million monthly users and growing at a rate of over a million signups per day. But Bluesky offers a very different experience. Both are ad-free (for now), but whereas Threads uses a single Meta-made algorithmic feed, Bluesky offers user-created algorithmic feeds in addition to its "Discover" and "Popular With Friends" ones.
What is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Bluesky has no monetization of users, and it's a distributed protocol, with far greater data mobility than Mastodon (internally, handles are distributed identifiers (DIDs) and your data is cryptographically signed and timestamped, allowing a backup to be restored to any server, with all data immediately discoverable with no difference in the frontend experience), so if the dev team ever "went rogue", the entire network can just spin off onto different servers.
Re: What is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
No one talking about what it is. Basically it the Dorsey answer to the free speech question, a protocol. Anyone can implement it on their own site, build their own communities allowing any speech, then a separate level is reach, which lets them decide who they wanna federate with for shared content. The blue sky site is the first showcase of the protocol. YouTube the Pink Floyd video from The Wall for song Goodbye Blue Sky, (remembering the twitter white bird) to get the name.
Re: What is it? (Score:2)
A protocol to do what? Protocols are good for communication and interoperability. It would be great if it really does allow people to pull the content into other clients and other websites. And sort and filter any way we like and also use AI to interact with it. I am not anti-twitter or anti-X one but, but I do believe we should be using open protocols on the Internet for the most important ways we communicate and publish information.
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So, first some background.
To be clear: the project is not "Dorsey". Jack was involved in its establishment, but that involvement was 1) starting a chat room to brainstorm ideas, and 2) providing seed funding. He was not involved in the design. He did not head the project (he did have one board seats for a while, but left, seemingly because nobody liked him there). He's not even on the site.
The idea did emerge as one of protocol. Jack always wanted Twitter to be more of an "ecosystem" rather than just a clo
Re: What is it? (Score:2)
Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for.
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Your website needs an IP. In ATProto, this is your DID (Distributed IDentifier). You, and all of your content, is linked to your DID, not to a specific server. So no matter where your data is stored, your DID will always point to it.
And how exactly does your DID point to it, in a distributed way? How do you map a given DID back to the "personal data server?"
Because it's not distributed in the current implementation. In fact, pretty much every distributed thing is all "we'll figure this out later." Currently, the answer is your DID maps to a server that Bluesky itself runs, and only via this server can you look up the instance a user is on.
And, since the current DID implementation is essentially just a database key, there's no way to re
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It was the #1 or #2 app download in most major markets as of yesterday, so the problem is you.
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It was the #1 or #2 app download in most major markets as of yesterday, so the problem is you.
If it is so well known that a description is unwarranted, then it is also so well known than an article about how popular it is should also be unwarranted.
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It was the #1 or #2 app download in most major markets as of yesterday, so the problem is you.
Despite most techies believing otherwise, most folks don't bother trying to keep track of every daily number 1 app download, as those daily totals tend to be fleeting at the best of times, and while you may miss the next Flappy Bird, you may also not waste time looking at the next million day and gone apps.
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What the fuck is Bluesky? Is it really so hard to include a fucking description? Seriously, what the fuck do you people actually do? Why haven't you been replaced by an LLM already?
Based on the "quality" of the editors the last few years, what makes you think they haven't been replaced by an LLM? They seem pretty inane, pretty bad at editing, and pretty bad at informational exchange. Seems to fit the LLMs I've interacted with.
Its all the same garbage. (Score:1)
What is the tech fascination with these nothing websites?
There's no new here. It's all just the same tired social media bullshit. Another ivy league hacker trying to monetize stupid people.
It even looks the same.
Will never hit critical mass (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Will never hit critical mass (Score:5, Interesting)
You hear all the time that some alternative Twitter/Facebook/Instagram platform is celebrating some million-user milestone, but then you check in a little while later and notice the active users steadily tanking.
I'd argue that this round of sign-ups - coupled with the extremely high number of Xitter account deactivations - is the critical mass moment for Bluesky.
Mastodon active users have been in a steady decline for a while now despite huge account creations after Musk bought Twitter. I'm sure this recent exodus to the platform du jour is no different.
Bluesky is closer to the "old Twitter" experience than Mastodon is.
As much as people want the echo chamber, they'd still prefer to be where everyone else is at.
And these days, it's not Xitter.
No one will be talking about Bluesky in a year.
If Meta hasn't completely ballsed up the moderation and FYP on Threads, that might've been true, now Bluesky has the momentum.
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Are you talking about you having looked at Bluesky or Twitter?
On Bluesky, add some feeds (left-hand menu) or Starter Packs (here [blueskydirectory.com]) on topics that you like. There is no sitewide "algorithm"; it's whatever you choose it to be.
In general, if you run stats comparisons, engagement is about 10x higher per-follower on Bluesky than on Twitter. Twitter is mostly a zombie site, with most accounts inactive or bots, and an algo that shovels a lot of ragebait, ideological content, and ads into feeds rather than people
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There is no sitewide "algorithm"; it's whatever you choose it to be.
So its an echo chamber?
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Bluesky is closer to the "old Twitter" experience than Mastodon is.
Censored by the US government [x.com]?
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Mastodon has issues with not being social enough, which means its growth will never match the commercial services. That may be completely fine though, it doesn't need to be huge to be a success in terms of being a nice place for finding communities and sharing stuff.
BlueSky is like Twitter used to be in the early days, a nice place with nice people. Meanwhile Twitter is just a torrent of rage and hate and the worst of humanity. I feel guilty not wanting to look at some of it, like the endless videos of war
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You hear all the time that some alternative Twitter/Facebook/Instagram platform is celebrating some million-user milestone, but then you check in a little while later and notice the active users steadily tanking. Mastodon active users have been in a steady decline for a while now despite huge account creations after Musk bought Twitter. I'm sure this recent exodus to the platform du jour is no different. As much as people want the echo chamber, they'd still prefer to be where everyone else is at. No one will be talking about Bluesky in a year.
They won't hit critical mass, until they do.
The Twitter user base is resilient, but as long as Elon Musk keeps spitting on anyone who isn't full fring-right they're going to keep bleeding users and the alternatives will keep growing, the streams will cross eventually. The blogs and news orgs are slowest to switch because of organizational inertia and they only want to pick the winner.
But when they do start going over the external funnel to Twitter gets shut off and Twitter is screwed.
Not to mention the volu
Threads is a ghost town (Score:1)
Until you can say you've grown past threads in usage, it's not much of a story.
Because outside of social media managers who need to justify their existence, nobody is using threads.
Re: (Score:2)
What feed are you even looking at? Certainly not the "Following" feed if you haven't followed anyone. Pick feeds and starter packs of users that interest you. There's 15 million users and 30% are active posters. You don't have to just randomly browse content from the firehose.
(Also, Mark Cuban just joined the other day, so if you were looking at the Discover feed, that may be why. But I don't see him on the Discover feed - the top person I see at the moment is George Takei)
Shiver me timbers (Score:2)
Re:Shiver me timbers (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know where you got the notion that Jay is a billionaire, but she most definitely is not.
Bluesky is run on a shoestring budget. There are no billionaires involved.
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Dorsey started a chat room for people to share ideas, provided seed money to the winning RFP (Jay's), and held one board seat for a while, before leaving (his board seat was taken by Techdirt's Mike Masnick [wikipedia.org]). He's not even on the site (he quickly found that most people there don't like him ;) ). Bluesky is majority owned by, and run by, Jay Graber [wikipedia.org], who was also the lead designer.
All the news mentions Dorsey because everyone's heard of him. But he was basically just a contest-hoster. He wanted to spur t
UK's "The Guardian" leaving (Score:4, Informative)
I note that the UK newspaper The Guardian has decided to stop using X/Twitter for its official accounts [theguardian.com].
This seems to be fairly widely reported, so just possibly other media organisations may take it up.
X/Twitter seems to be valued at between 10% and 25% if what Musk paid for it.
Oh noes! (Score:2)
One of the draws (Score:2)
Users are moving to BlueSky, among other reasons, because "Block" means BLOCK. Once one user blocks another, there can be no further interaction between the two users unless the first user removes that block. Contrast this to the former Twitter, where a recent policy change allows blocked users to continue to view the blocking user's posts and comments, arguably creating a vehicle for cyberstalking...or worse.
In combination with a distinct lack of advertising, no algorithms that promote or demote individual