Bluesky Grows to 30 Million Users. Threads Adds 20 Million More Just in January (techcrunch.com) 70
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].
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 (Score:1)
Re:Bluesky (Score:4, Informative)
Not Twitter. People leaving Twitter because of musk.
Re: Bluesky (Score:2, Insightful)
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Even if a side won the "war" then you'd just start another one within the winning party. Lot of good that would do.
Re: Bluesky (Score:2)
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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: Bluesky (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Bluesky (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Bluesky (Score:1)
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It was a sham trial. Sandy hook is owed nothing.
It was a default judgement.
Re: Bluesky (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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My final straw came way before then, but then I thought Twitter was garbage to begin with. Now it's worse than garbage.
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And so much more. The guy is corrosive like his butt buddy Trump.
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Don't sat the C word! There are only two sexes, man and woman. There are no such things as hermaphrodites or asexual creatures. Science is a lie!
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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.
Hate is universal (Score:2)
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.
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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?
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Re:Bluesky (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Trump vs Bush Jr (Score:2)
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.
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Re:Bluesky (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Musk is an evil piece of shit. Everybody is opposite his side.
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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.
Bluesky is for real adults (Score:2)
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
A Twitter Clone (Score:1, Insightful)
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)
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:4, Informative)
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.
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... leftist echo chamber ...
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Well, to be fair, Musk outed himself as a far right trash, making Nazi salutes and such. The US peak Zionist lobby fell over itself trying to say an arm gesture wasn't what anyone thought it was, only for Musk to double down on the cray cray by making corny jokes about Nazism.
Then there's speaking at a AfD conference.
So, yes, any decent human being would have left Twitter by now. Elon cancelled himself.
Musk is a Nazi, but we already knew this (Score:2)
He proved his Nazi bona-fides a couple years ago with his various antisemitic posts. He has some sycophantic Jewish friends who sucked off his money teat to soften his image, but there are always race traitors among us. Nothing new here.
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And how do you call a tweet on X ? A X ?
And renaming twitter is just one drop of stupid in this stupid nazi dumpster fire.
Look, Musk is daring us to prove that a very popular platform can in fact be abandoned if it is ruled like shit, it'd be rude not to leave.
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I signed up, it seems useless (Score:1)
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.
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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.
I think it's safe to say we've seen (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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So where we are now: Shitter still runs. Shitter still has users. Shit
Twitter had 500 million users when it was bought (Score:2)
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
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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.
Also don't forget we're talking active daily users (Score:2)
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(Thing that is not X) is where radical leftists are going because they keep getting community fact-checked into oblivion.
Ever since X became a platform that lets users point a posts inconsistencies, lack of context, or most importantly, missing facts usually left out by someone trying to spin a narrative, I find myself going there to find out the truth of whats going. Yes, it still takes a good BS filter, but at least you can see the context and facts other users have pointed out are missing.
Looking at the leaderboard on community notes, most accounts I don't recognize at all but I see a few far right wing accounts and afaik no radical leftists https://community-notes-leader... [community-...rboard.com] This is no doubt due to a lack of knowledge on my part so I'd be most grateful if someone could point to the top 3 radical leftist accounts on that list? (Elon is #48).
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It seems about the same as ever to me. I didn't read it before and I don't read it now, but no change in quality at all.
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Talk about a snowflake living in a bubble...
Fascism was left wing? I guess the Nazis were a bunch of faggots then. At least that explains the fashion sense.
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Note that Fascism is Left Wing
This is literally, actually, and in all other ways the opposite of both fact and truth. Being right wing is (again, actually literally, hmm that's twice today) part of the definition.
But what happens to threads, long term? (Score:2, Flamebait)
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
x is great (Score:1)