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Bluesky Grows to 30 Million Users. Threads Adds 20 Million More Just in January (techcrunch.com) 158

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

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  • Bluesky (Score:2, 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.

    • A Twitter Clone (Score:2, 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.
          • by Nugoo ( 1794744 )
            This is exactly wrong. Adults will remove themselves from toxic environments. Children will argue, and petulantly mock you when you leave, or otherwise fail to give the response they're looking for.
            • You do understand the meaning of the word "ignore"?

              Adults don't say an environment is "toxic". If someone is rude, or worse, an adult ignores them. Insecure teenage girls might be affected, but they aren't adults. What are you?

              • At face value, you are arguing for a position that I am 100% certain that no sane adult believes.

                It is a matter of context.

                If I have a feed whose topics include politics, of course it would be lame to curate away all opinions that differ from mine. Of course, I accept that some people will make lame choices -- that is how freedom works.

                But if I am running a feed where the topic is organic farmer and someone keeps goading participants with off topic political posts, I am going to be quick to shut that down.

                • You just found out about spam. Spam is spam, spam is not a "toxic environment".

                  Look at Slashdot, AFAIK very few comments are deleted, "bad" comments are voted down and you just browse at some level where these comments aren't displayed. Apply that model mentally to everything else.

      • I'm mostly on bluesky because I don't like the idea that advertising dollars flow to Elon because I use his website
      • 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.

        Those bastards enabled all of this shit. Fuck the Democrats (but only after fucking the Republicans even harder. They allowed themselves to infiltrated by evil people and became THE evil people)

  • 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.

      • 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.
    • Musk saw that the narrative was being controlled, so he stepped in to stop other people from controlling the narrative. He then made the classic blunder of controlling the narrative to stop others from controlling the narrative and now he is completely lost in mental gymnastics of controlling the narrative while trying to not control the narrative. Sad really.

      Hands off. Relax. Let Reality take control again. But no, it is too late for that. Nosedive.

  • 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

  • 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...

  • He used to be my role model. Now it feels like he decided to embody the Luke Skywalker version that drinks walrus milk.
  • It's like treating a burn with a blowtorch. (Unless you're a business, then you should probably be on every major platform.)

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