Bluesky Crosses the 15 Million User Mark (theverge.com) 56
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:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
In a nutshell, it's the latest social media echo chamber for people who have become disenchanted with previous echo chambers, and are fleeing to a place where they don't have to be exposed to others with differing opinions. Think of it as "Truth Social", except with different politics.
What it does share in common with all other social media echo chambers it that it was created to monetize its users. So if you want to go play
Re:What is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: What is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 closed-box website. They looked at Mastodon's ActivityPub, but it has a lot of scaling and data portability issues. So they started a chat room and invited a bunch of people with experience in the space (a lot of them with P2P backgrounds) to come in and brainstorm a new design, on promise of funding. At the end there was a RFP. Jay's won
(A brief irony break: Her real name is Lantian Graber. She adopted the nickname "Jay" because she liked the name of the bird. Lantian means "Blue Sky". It was pure coincidence that she ended up working on a bird-themed website's "Project Bluesky")
Jack's initial idea was that the Bluesky project would exist within Twitter. Jay however negotiated to retain control of it as a third party (thankfully - if she hadn't done that, it would have just been killed off when Elon bought Twitter).
Bluesky is not the name of the protocol. Bluesky is an instance of the elements of the protocol (one designed with a user interface very reminiscent of pre-Elon Twitter), said protocol being ATProto. Like ActivityPub, ATProto involves a distributed architecture for sending arbitrary types of data around a distributed architecture. However, they take very different approaches.
In ActivityPub (Mastodon), the analogy is web forums. Each server is an island, and all "services" run on that server. Its admin is a God-King who can do whatever he wants with his subjects and their data. Moderate it, delete it, change it, make fake posts in their name, whatever. You can "move" your account to a different server, but really only your metadata - and even that requires the cooperation of the server that you're on. If they disappear or block your move, game over. Your data can never move. The reason is that all references to it are keyed off of that specific server as part of its address. For content to be visible on your server, it has to have downloaded it. This creates an exponential scaling problem O(N^2) proportional to the number of nodes. The solution is that most nodes just don't download most content unless one of their users is specifically following someone who creates it. So you can't search it (if you can even search at all; a lot of servers don't implement ElasticSearch) and it limits the content available in topic-based feeds.
That's just a start of the issues and reasons why ActivityPub was rejected. In ATProto, the analogy is not forums, but rather more like personal websites.
With a website, you have a server. In the ATProto analogue, it's a PDS (Personal Data Server). All of your posts, and indeed, replies to other people's posts, and basically anything you do publicly, is stored there. You can run your own, but like most people do with websites (run on commercial webhosts), you can also use a public PDS. You can backup and restore your data at will.
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.
IPs are of course hard to remember (DIDs, even moreso); that's why we have domain names. In ATProto, this is your handle. You can change your handle at will, but it always maps to your DID. Handles in ATProto are literal domain names. Most people just have their handle as a .bsky.social subdomain, but you can add a DNS record to any domain you administer to authenticate an ATProto handle to that domain. Because of th
Re: What is it? (Score:2)
Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for.
Re: (Score:1)
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's straight from IPLD [github.com], the underlying P2P tech behind IPFS. A lot of the underlying tech is (note: ATProto doesn't use IPFS itself, just IPLD). Most of the devs have P2P backgrounds.
Can you people please stop inventing falsehoods to get mad at? Life is so much better if you don't invent your own mise
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It's straight from IPLD, the underlying P2P tech behind IPFS.
No, it isn't. Don't lie.
You look it up by doing a REST request to plc.directory/[DID].
Which is a centralized service and the master repository for the DID, under the control of Bluesky.
Re: What is it? (Score:2)
I have *literally written a script to read from the firehose*. It *is* friggin IPLD. Archives are CARs. Storage is binary DAG-CBOR. Binaries are referenced by CID. The backend *IS* built on IPLD. For God's sake, try it for yourself. I could send you a CAR of my account right now if you want. You don't even need to mess with ATProto to do so. Literally, just open a Bluesky account, go to "Settings", then "Export My Data", then "Download CAR file", then look at it. *It's IPLD*.
Re: What is it? (Score:2)
Let's go a step further. Let's take a random Bluesky URL, like this image:
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_... [bsky.app]
Without any context, let's ask Claude to analyze the last part of that URL:
Claude's response:
Re: What is it? (Score:2)
And just to be clear: the server in that URL is an *AppView*. Appviews do not host the data (beyond caching). That DID points to the location of the PDS where the data can be found. There are 3rd party PDSs, entirely independent of Bluesky's internal PDSs, and they work just fine. To the point that about a week ago a network outage left Bluesky's PDSs inaccessible, and for a short period of time, 3rd party PDS users had the whole network to themselves. ;)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It was the #1 or #2 app download in most major markets as of yesterday, so the problem is you.
Re:What is it? (Score:4)
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.
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I went looking for it but my autocorrect gave me Greensky Bluegrass instead and I'm in a way happier place than if I had actually found the Bluesky bubble.
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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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If that's what you want? If you're looking for somewhere to torment you with stuff you don't want to see, then no, Bluesky isn't for you.
Well, actually, I take that back, you could deliberately add feeds you don't like to torment yourself if you wanted. What you can't do is force your torment on others.
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Yes, it is: 600 million vs 15 million.
How many of those 600 million users are human users that are actively posting or engaging with posts? Bluesky users are reporting better engagement despite having far lower follower counts than they did on Twitter.
X.com is still where people are and you don't have to like its CEO to use its product. Just like Windows, Facebook, Ford or whoever.
If it was just the CEO that was the issue then I'm sure plenty of people would've have stayed. The content cesspool is the issue now, coupled with decisions like the recent changes to blocking.
Stop the pathetic virtue signalling
That comment says more about you than it does about me.
no-one normal cares about you, or Bluesky.
And yet Bluesky is the number 1 free app in the US
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Bluesky is closer to the "old Twitter" experience than Mastodon is.
Censored by the US government [x.com]?
Re:Will never hit critical mass (Score:4, Informative)
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 crimes in Gaza, the exposure of fake news from Amsterdam, the latest bit of hate mobbing someone needs help with... But I'm a human being, there is only so much of that I can take before it becomes depressing and bad for my mental health.
Hopefully BlueSky stays nice. Twitter was doing okay until Musk wrecked it. I know there was a lot of complaining about it, but I think it's a case of not knowing what we had until it was gone.
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Musk deleted a lot of the tools you need to keep the experience pleasant. You can't even properly block people anymore on Twitter. As long as BlueSky keeps those tools, it should be much better.
Re: Will never hit critical mass (Score:1)
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All the people migrating over from Twitter.
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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:3)
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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Re:Shiver me timbers (Score:4, Interesting)
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 the creation of a distributed protocol that Twitter could then adopt, to try to "de-silo-ize" Twitter. Thankfully, Jay negotiated to have Bluesky be an independent public benefit corporation rather than to exist within Twitter - otherwise, it would have been immediately killed off by Elon.
UK's "The Guardian" leaving (Score:3, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet X was enough to make a difference in the US election.
Bluesky on the other hand..
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
Whiskty (Score:2)
Bluesky is pronounced the same as whisky, right?
The elephant in the room (Score:2, Informative)
The people figured this out a long time ago. Only the blind whistle past this issue. Whether you like it or not, X is the only platform that allows free speech. On X, you can say whatever you want as long as it's legal. You can even express your hatred for Elon.
None of the other services operate like that. All of the rest censor hate speech, disinformation and all the other legal speech they just
Re: (Score:2)
The elephant in the room is that all of these services are "moderated". Which means CENSORED.
Wish I had mod points.
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That's utter bullshit. "Moderated" CAN mean "censored" if it's not done right. There's lots of sites where it is done right, though, sites where fascists and their pet brown-shirts can't flood a dissenting voice with so much hate no single person can match them.
Musk, or the algorithm he uses, has been limiting the reach of people who don't kneel to Trump and Putin. He certainly doesn't censor hate speech, though. If you want your daily fix of White Supremacist garbage, there's so much of it on X, you ne
meta-irony (Score:2)
"Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach."
That's Musk's answer to dealing with controlling who is heard. But what's the difference between an invisible post and a deleted one? Or someone muted and someone silent? Semantics. So if the government, now Trump, asks Musk to tone down some speech, he will, and not call it censorship. The opposite has also been done where Musk has amplified his own speech. Even if you stop following him, he'll show up in your notifications. Or even change the upvote button anima