Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Social Networks

Bluesky Grows to 30 Million Users. Threads Adds 20 Million More Just in January (techcrunch.com) 114

Posted by EditorDavid from the loose-Threads dept.
Star Wars star Mark Hamill, science fiction author William Gibson, XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe, and The Onion have joined millions of others bringing Bluesky's user count to 30 million, reports CNET. In fact Bluesky has added over 14 million users in the last three months, and for a few days in early November was adding over one million users a day. "That rate equals about 12 new users per second. The 30 million user mark compares to 9 million users in September."

But meanwhile Meta's social media site Threads — launched 19 months ago — "now has 320 million monthly active users," reports TechCrunch, "up from 300 million last month. The app had 275 million monthly active users in [early] November." That's a 16% grow rate in just three months. In comparison, Bluesky is experiencing a slowdown in growth, with an increase of less than 10% month-over-month in December 2024, following a remarkable 189% growth in November, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Bluesky now has a total of 26.44 million users. Additionally, Zuckerberg noted that Threads is adding more than 1 million daily signups [while presenting fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday].

Bluesky Grows to 30 Million Users. Threads Adds 20 Million More Just in January More | Reply

Bluesky Grows to 30 Million Users. Threads Adds 20 Million More Just in January

Comments Filter:

  • Bluesky (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Would be nice if the fine summary mentioned what exactly this is.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by waspleg ( 316038 )

      Not Twitter. People leaving Twitter because of musk.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by bradley13 ( 1118935 )

        I am on X, and follow a number of accounts on both sides of the political spectrum. However, there are fewer and fewer posts from the left - indeed, apparently because they stopped posting and went elsewhere. Most likely because couldn't stand the fact that Musk is not politically on their side.

        Honestly, it's pretty pathetic. Why is it that people cannot tolerate differences of opinion? Bluesky, by all accounts, is now a left-leaning refuge, and a couple of conservative folk I know were promptly banned for

        • Re: Bluesky (Score:2, Insightful)

          by zawarski ( 1381571 )
          Because we are at war. Pick a side.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by sarren1901 ( 5415506 )

            Even if a side won the "war" then you'd just start another one within the winning party. Lot of good that would do.

            • So you are saying the only winning move is not to play?

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by sarren1901 ( 5415506 )

                I'd say we should bring the rhetoric down a notch or two because the opposing party isn't the nearly the devil they are made out to be. We'd be better off with more compromise and less theatrics and showboating.

                I'm expecting to much out of people though.

                • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                  by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

                  Acceptance of abuse is not tolerance, it is enablement.

                  People who deliberately chose to bring a racist rapist to the white house and don't understand how privatizing its functions is a bad thing cannot be approached with reason, only with caution.

                • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

                  by WaffleMonster ( 969671 )

                  I'd say we should bring the rhetoric down a notch or two because the opposing party isn't the nearly the devil they are made out to be. We'd be better off with more compromise and less theatrics and showboating.

                  War is an accurate description of the current state of affairs. Trump incited insurrection, pardoned those who violently attacked police, and fired FBI agents who investigated the attackers. Trump and his cult have openly declared war on the United States of America.

                  • This. He should not have given a mass pardon to the J6 people. He should have demanded trials and let the truth come out. Whether they were guilty of insurrection, trespass, whatever. That needed to come from the courts, not a rushed pardon.
            • Splitter!

        • Re:Bluesky (Score:4, Insightful)

          by refitman ( 958341 ) on Saturday February 01, 2025 @01:44PM (#65135099) Homepage Journal
          People mainly left because Musk reinstated nazi and nonce accounts.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by coop247 ( 974899 )
            Deleted my account the day Alex Jones wasn't just re-instated, but welcomed like a hero by Musk himself on a spaces chat. That was the final straw. How that wasn't everyone's final straw, I'll never know.
            • Why do you hate Alex Jones so much? Hes a conspiracy nut, for sure. I can't listen to him. But to change something you're doing cause some guy you don't really care about and won't interact with unless you sought him out is pretty crazy too.
              • He's a bad dude, who's currently trying to screw the Sandy Hook families out of the money they were awarded. Seems perfectly reasonable to not want to share a platform, where he's welcomed with open arms.

                • I can't stand him either, I've always despised conspiracy theories. Shit, progressives fucking adored him back in the 911truth days and all throughout the Bush years and the very early Obama years. I've only ever wanted to give him the proverbial Buzz Aldrin treatment for as long as I've known his name.

                  But at the same time, I've never been comfortable deplatforming anybody. I think it's better when they're allowed to kick their own butts. He did exactly that with Sandy Hook, and now he's worse than bankrupt

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 )

                Alex Jones profited massively by, among other evil deeds, spreading lies that increased the suffering of people whose children had just been murdered. Are you cool with that? Is he just "some guy"? I don't think so. Karma would be him being tortured to death on a live stream.

                • Pretty sure (Wikipedia agrees) Alex Jones actually lost everything he owns in judgment.

                  I'm not cool with what we did at all, but it's quite false that he profited massively. He's bankrupt.

            • My final straw came way before then, but then I thought Twitter was garbage to begin with. Now it's worse than garbage.

            • This is really dumb you could have simply blocked him and continued on your merry life but no you had to virtue signal.

          • And so much more. The guy is corrosive like his butt buddy Trump.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by coop247 ( 974899 )
          "Tolerating differences of opinion" and "having the most awful content blasted into your feed no matter how much you block" are two very different things. XChan is a firehouse of right wing nonsense and outright lies. Why would anyone want that, let alone people that don't agree with it.

          Also it's quite clear that Elon is a direct threat to the nation, so supporting him in any way is a non-starter for many. It should be for MOST.

          • Lots of people enjoy the hatred. The right go to X and many, many other sites. The left go to Electronic Intifada and Common Dreams. The rest of us want them all to fuck off.

            • Lots of people enjoy the hatred. The right go to X and many, many other sites. The left go to Electronic Intifada and Common Dreams. The rest of us want them all to fuck off.

              I've never previously heard of Electronic Intifada and Common Dreams but looking at them they seem to be news publications and not social media sites or am I missing something?

          • Well I guess the good thing that you can simply follow only the people that you follow instead of getting everybody else unlike when it was Twitter and they basically pushed left wing ideology on to everybody

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jhoegl ( 638955 )
          Apparently you dont know shit.

        • Re:Bluesky (Score:5, Interesting)

          by karmawarrior ( 311177 ) on Saturday February 01, 2025 @02:50PM (#65135223) Journal

          If a bar is full of Nazis, you stop going there.

          Note also it's not just the left that's leaving, it's the non-extreme right as well.

          Social media isn't simply about sharing opinions you might disagree with occasionally. I can have a discussion with a Bush-era conservative on some topics I feel very strongly about such as Bush's use of war or torture - which however awful was argued by right wingers at the time to be justified in terms of long term saving lives, etc. Most political discussions in the 2000s related to whether government intervention was needed to provide healthcare, for example, and if so how much. Certain political commentators who would stray into racism or homophobia were usually ignored, and constituted a tiny group anyway. There were some who promoted discrimination against Muslims, but even Bush famously condemned that train of thought.

          This is a very different group of people from today's MAGA group, where we're seriously discussing removing rights from women, and from LGBT people, and where we're discussing deporting people for no good reason (the pro-deportation arguments are usually about crime, which all the statistics show is not actually coming from immigrants, illegal or otherwise) and where we're proposing deporting them to countries they've escaped from because those countries are run by tyrants.

          We're also looking at the basic rights of liberals being crippled. MAGA is cheering on purges of government workers at every level (yes, we expect management changes from time to time to align with government priorities, that's normal, but Project 2025 is about everyone) for their political views. We're seeing serious questions rising about whether we'll even have a vote in two years time.

          In other words, liberals and conservatives in the 2000s at least started on the basis that people were human beings born with certain inalienable rights, and deserving of a minimal level of respect until proven otherwise, while now MAGA doesn't have that common basis. MAGA is, in many ways, the invading anti-American culture it pretends to hate. A nation of immigrants, that overcame much of its racist slave-holding beginnings albeit aware much more needed to be done, that rejected religious government, that saw greatness in what it could build, that welcomed those fleeing persecution and was itself built upon that - how anti-American can you be to oppose all of that and want to impose this pseudo-christian (no, Jesus wouldn't support any of this shit) fascist bullshit on the country instead?

          We our losing our democracy and seeing our friends, our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, put in serious danger as MAGA politicians take it in turns to show how anti-women or anti-LGBT or anti-brown they are, and you're expecting everyone to just see this as a "political" difference.

          There's nothing pathetic about refusing a seat at a table with fascists on it. Nothing at all. Pathetic is going along with it and staying with these people because you want to be respected or liked by them. And evil is being the fascist to begin with.

          • Bush Jr. took many steps towards what Trump is today. He glorified being stupid and incompetent. Thanks to mishandling Iraq and Afghanistan, he gave a massive boost to everything evil in the world, especially Iran. Bush Jr was a far worse president over eight years than Trump was in four, but Trump just said, "Hold my beer". We'll have to see.

          • Never mind that the bots, spam and garbage has gotten completely out of control on twitter. With the prioritising of blue subs in replies it means if you want to see the genuine humans you have to wade through a whole lot of low effort crap or just outright bots.
            I stopped bothering with twitter when the people and groups I follow were mostly on bluesky. Also, bluesky has some genuinely great moderation tools where before to get the crap out of my feed I'd have to individually block the spam accounts whils

        • Re:Bluesky (Score:4, Informative)

          by waspleg ( 316038 ) on Saturday February 01, 2025 @03:15PM (#65135263) Journal

          He literally deletes accounts that say shit he doesn't like. Including right wing ones, while screaming about he's a free speech absolutist.

          What he does though, is act like a butt hurt middle schooler - which is what you should expect from yet-another-textbook-narcissist. I've never used Twitter, or Facebook, or any of that other trash and I have no interest in Bluesky either.

          I do recommend the LeopardsAteMyFace subreddit though. [reddit.com] It's absolutely overflowing with MAGA regrets and will likely remain so for at minimum the next 4 years and maybe longer.

          • ... no interest in Bluesky ...

            No-one on Bluesky is bragging they voted for Trump, that trashing the US constitution is good, that not paying wages and disbursements is good.

            Mark Cuban is on it declaring they needed to invite the abandoned MAGA to fight against the pro-hating, pro-killing bigots left in the MAGA collective. That's history revisionism: The abandoned MAGA did nothing wrong and want their day of thievery and bloodshed, want what they were promised. The MAGA collective is the only thing that can fulfill those promises.

        • Musk is an evil piece of shit. Everybody is opposite his side.

        • I am on X, and follow a number of accounts on both sides of the political spectrum. However, there are fewer and fewer posts from the left - indeed, apparently because they stopped posting and went elsewhere. Most likely because couldn't stand the fact that Musk is not politically on their side.

          My understanding Musk tweaked algorithm to favor himself and his political ideology. The flood of bot nonsense plus changes to nerf blocking policy lead to the exodus.

          https://www.theverge.com/2024/... [theverge.com]

          Honestly, it's pretty pathetic. Why is it that people cannot tolerate differences of opinion?

          What I find to be "pretty pathetic" is tolerance of abuse of power.

        • My SO tried Twitter and despised it yeeeeears ago, long before any of the political controversies alluded to on any of these comments. Long before Trump even dipped a toe into politics. She has strong reasons for like Bluesky.

          The key feature of Bluesky is the control of your feed is in your hands, not some central authority.

          Want certain topics? Go find specific tagged streams on those topics.

          A troll is annoying? Block the troll (and deny the troll access to your posts). And because trolls are so easy t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          You're kidding, right? No one is that uninformed. You'd have to be in a coma following a traumatic brain injury.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          Gee, I can't imagine why they'd leave [unherd.com].

          As one person I know who was still at Twitter put it but left after the election: he initially thought it was stupid leaving the platform and just handing it over to the right, but then when the election approached, suddenly the algo switched to shoving a ton of pro-right ragebait into his feed, and then the moment the election was over it stopped - and the fact that the attempted manipulation was so blatant was the last straw for him.

          As for me, I left well earlier, mad

    • A Twitter Clone (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Kunedog ( 1033226 )

      Would be nice if the fine summary mentioned what exactly this is.

      It's a Twitter clone attempting to recapture the glory days of 2020, when all major social media networks could be counted on to participate in a widespread news blackout of an inconvenient national story.

    • Re:Bluesky (Score:5, Informative)

      by hort_wort ( 1401963 ) on Saturday February 01, 2025 @12:49PM (#65135015)

      It's an alternative to X that is meant to be a place for Democrats to gather. Whether it proves to be helpful or hurtful to their cause, only time will tell.

      • Re:Bluesky (Score:5, Informative)

        by Comrade Ogilvy ( 1719488 ) on Saturday February 01, 2025 @04:32PM (#65135391)

        It is a place for people who want control of their feed, rather than let their personal attention be whored by a corporate owned algorithm.

        And because it is easy to block trolls, the childish attention getting antics common to most social media work poorly.

        People who abhor civil discourse are quick to claim that civil discourse is some kind of "Democrat" thing. They may be right about that.

        • Adults don't block. Adults argue or ignore.

          • It sounds like it's going to be like Reddit, where you're blocked from conversations proactively because you posted in a different conversation tjay everyone disagreed with. You posted that you like Android phones? You're blocked from the iPhone reddits so you don't bring in your opposing views. That kind of thing.

  • I don't care about trends or pop culture, I have specialized interests.
    Bluesky appears to have very few who I find interesting.
    Alternate platforms are fine for those who want mainstream crap.
    Getting a critical mass of users in an obscure specialty is nearly impossible.

    • This is absolutely true.

      But it's also absolutely true that in order to BUILD that community or critical mass, people also need to make the step.

      Good for you, now continue to encourage others. It'll be better before you know it. Just takes a little work.

    • But the question is how many of those adds on threads are real versus bots? On bluesky since there is not the frantic commercial aspect to it, I'd expect more of those adds on bluesky are real users.

  • I think it's safe to say we've seen (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday February 01, 2025 @01:08PM (#65135035)
    The effects of Elon musk's stewardship of twitter. By all accounts Twitter has lost half of its user base. And an equivalent number of advertisers. More really because so many of the advertisers left are the really dodgy ones like penis pills and other natural male enhancements. These guys don't pay nearly as much as somebody like Nestle or one of the major car companies.

    And yes some of them have come back to do a little bribery but it'll be just enough to get attention from the administration. Not the kind of long-term ad campaigns.

    You can't just fire half your staff and then start barking orders and expect things to go well. Yeah they've managed to keep the website from completely collapsing, mostly thanks to you ridiculously overworked H1B employees. But the actual site is dying. And if it wasn't for its utility in politics and propaganda it would be shutting down in a few years. The company owes $1.5 billion a year in interest payments alone let alone the value of the debt itself. And best case scenario it's revenue is half what it was when it was already unprofitable. There's only so much you can make up by firing people. Especially when it costs you users and customers.
    • Not all accounts. I read that Shitter now has 375 million users, which "by all accounts" is nearly 2x what they had before Leon bought it. I don't know who to believe. Actually, I do know who to believe, and that is nobody. What I take away from Shitter still being a thing, still up and working, is that Leon was actually right <gag> ... the company was 75% fat. So apparently he fired 75% of the staff aaaaaand.... its still running.

      So where we are now: Shitter still runs. Shitter still has users. Shit
      • And every single estimate says they're down to about half that..

        The site runs but has frequent issues and tons of features just don't work. They are completely focused on the bare minimum needed to keep the propaganda flowing.

        You are absolutely right though about the propaganda value. It helped Trump win and without Trump Musk while not in the poor house won't have any companies anymore. SpaceX is a national security risk and Tesla is only functional because of a $8,000 government subsidy applied at

      • Certainly there are more bots arguing with each other than ever before. Actual users? Far fewer. I used to see news stories that were essentially Twitter posts linked together. Those are fewer and further between because so many fewer content makers use the platform.

        • If somebody gets counted as a user because they see a Twitter post embedded in a web page that's not real. Those kind of "users" never see any advertisements on the site. The only reason embedding is allowed is because it's basically free advertisement for your platform but it's not bringing in new users anymore because of the bad reputation Twitter has now
      • Don't forget musk also dropped 300M on trump campaign directly. Such sketchy things as the lottery that wasn't really a lottery as an example. As to the debt, I thought the banks were trying to offload some of it recently. They were not happy with the shitter loans.

  • The zuck bent the knee and capitulated to the MAGAts not too long ago himself. The nastiness has already been spreading throughout Facebook. And with the zuck and the muskrat now united and goose-marching lockstep on the same side, united under their worship of and fealty to dear leader, what happens to threads? Is the zuck more of a capitalist at heart who will see a market niche and let threads remain a neutral and non-toxic alternative to the trumping propaganda machine that twitter/x has become and F

  • I used to get banned for dumbnshit all the time on twitter , you know like questioning whether or not a aptop was real, or calling men men instead of women..... With x I can now simpl follow thoss i want and ignore everything else if I want an echo chamber. I get a whole lot less bots hitting my page I get actual engagement that matters and community notes is the best thing that's shown up as you can see even Facebook is now stealing community notes I'm not gonna go join another random thing it's like they

  • Bluesky doesn't have an existing platform with 2 Billion active users that it can spam with advertisements/transition to use Threads... especially when they post threads samples that might be interesting to read, but you need to USE the damned thing to see it further.

    Bluesky has the hurdle of you actively creating a new account and all that that entails on a new social media platform.

    On a side note, glad Bluesky is not growing too quickly... the content/user quality is still really good. With virtually no

  • It will have to be monetized to pay for this scale of service and will eventually follow the same path as all other social media then people will be onto the next one...

  • From the impact that Twitter had in politics over the last two decades, including the X era, it would not be difficult to draw the conclusion that microblogging does not lead to pro-social discourse. Bluesky seems to also comprise insulated fora where conspiracies and mostly-unsound ideas are bounced back and forth, used by people to negotiate and express group allegiances rather than engage in the style of conversation that lead us to grow and examine our own positions, ideas, values, and even the facts th

Slashdot Top Deals

Nothing is faster than the speed of light ... To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the light comes on.

Close