Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X : technology

[–] maplebar@lemmy.world 56 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

BlueSky is really just Twitter pretending to be Mastodon, but that's a minor issue compared to the problems associated with platforms like "X" and TikTok today.

What matters most right now is killing off Twitter and breaking up the dominance of any one platform on social media. I really don't care where people go as long as they get the fuck off of Twitter and TikTok. Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion. Divide and conquer.

[–] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 32 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion.

No they won't, Reddit killed Internet Forums, Threads has over 200 million active monthly users, and BlueSky already has double the number of users of Mastadon and is adding 10 new ones PER SECOND . Mastadon will be entirely irrelevant by the end of Q1 2025.

What we're watching right now is the exact same fight that the chat platforms had back in the early 2000s. AOL chat vs IRC vs Yahoo Chat vs Microsoft Messenger. That was temporarily addressed by using multi-service clients like Trillian...and then Facebook rolled in and squashed them all. BTW there are several multi-platform clients out there right now that will allow you to interact with Xitter, Threads, BlueSky, and Mastadon simultaneously just like the Trillian of old.

I've been around the Internet since the BBS days and I can't think of a single time where a de-centralized platform has out competed a centralized platform with "normal" users.

[–] maplebar@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

There's a lot you aren't taking into consideration, for example where those users are coming from.

Threads is just Instagram, it's essentially the same account, so its users were baked in from the start. How many of those Threads users are just people who already used Instagram?
BlueSky really isn't pulling users from Mastodon, it's pulling them from "X.com", which if nothing else represents a breaking up of old Twitter, which is good for decentralization in general. Any fracturing of social media is good for the fediverse.
Both Threads and BlueSky are, to some degree, copies of Mastodon in terms of their relationship with federation. Threads uses ActivityPub itself (a win for the fediverse, depending on how you look at it), and BlueSky has their own AT federation protocol, which shows that the ideas behind the fediverse are already winning out. It's entirely possible that, at some point in the future, BlueSky and Mastodon learn to speak to each other using one of those protocols (or a new one), and then the fediverse wins by default.
Fediverse apps like Misskey are apparently doing great in Japan, which is great for the existence of Japanese artists and the international side of things.

The fact that we're here, right now, discussing this on the fediverse, shows that ActivityPub has come a long way. Bluesky is nothing more than a shallow copy of Mastodon with far less federation and far fewer features.

Mastodon is a bit like Linux, due to its free and open nature. It can be in 3rd place for 20 years, but it'll keep chugging along, improving and growing over time until it snowballs into something truly formidable. Linux doesn't need to be the most popular operating system ecosystem to be great, nor does Mastodon need to be the most popular social media server. Unlike a corporate product it's not just going to die and disappear just because it isn't the most popular of the social media platforms.

[–] evatronic@lemm.ee 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I’ve been around the Internet since the BBS days and I can’t think of a single time where a de-centralized platform has out competed a centralized platform with “normal” users.

I'm right there with you. I'd love to see the dream of the decentralized media return, but it's long-dead. The "Normal" user doesn't give a fuck about the benefits and even the moderate barrier to entry over some centralized platform is enough to keep them away.

Tech-minded people seem to often forget that even the most simplistic choices like "Choose an instance" is a big deal for people. The platform that's the most familiar, and easiest to use is going to be the one that wins, and, right now, that looks like it's Bluesky.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 6 points 2 weeks ago

It's not even "chose an instance". This is what my journey has been:

Chose an instance
Write an essay about why you wanted that one 3 never her reply, repeat 1 and 2
Get access, then instance goes offline. Repeat 1 and 2
Get another instance. They then bock piracy communities. Repeat 1 and 2
Land in lemm.ee.
Wait until I can block instances to get rid of nuances (everybody knows who I'm talking about)

Now try to get your non tech friends on board.

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[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 55 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

3 more million needed for Mastodon, Threads and Blue Sky to beat Twitter.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

How many does Threads have?

[–] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 35 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

So, you're asking what the thread count is?

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Threads has 275 million.

[–] cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

So basically .. ah

[–] kippinitreal@lemmy.world 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well its not organic at all. I remember it'd create a Threads account for you even if you interacted with a Threads post while logged into Instagram. Kinda shady to boast about such numbers imo.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah that number has to be way bigger than the others for this reason.

[–] cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 42 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This shows how bad threads is.

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago

Threads is honestly terrible. There are these asinine little widgets on Instagram that show you threads that people have posted and don't show you the full one so you click see more and it brings you to the app store. But no one really uses it much, so you see a lot of things being posted with no interaction at all

[–] TheGiantKorean@lemmy.world 37 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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[–] thal3s@sh.itjust.works 33 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I sincerely doubt 1 million regular people a day are leaving Twitter.

We’re watching bot accounts be created at scale in real time.

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 59 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I think "leave" is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.

I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, "The creatives have moved to Bluesky."

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 weeks ago

I've heard of people having similar experiences on Mastodon as well. Seems like these smaller communities of early adopters tend to simply be more active and pleasant to interact with.

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[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You underestimate the news cycle hitting regular folk who so far didn't know alternatives existed to twitter.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah once the mainstream media started picking up Reddit stories, that’s when Reddit started going to shit.

[–] llii@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

inb4 bluesky gets bought by Musk (or bezos) for a fantistillion dollars. And everyone doing a surprised pikachu face.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That is the only likely future ahead. BS is growing so fast that there's no way they can sustain this growth even if they add ads. The only path forward is selling out. I think Microsoft might be interested in finally owning a popular social media site.

[–] Paranomaly@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Won't happen. Not necessarily the them not buying it part, but it staying popular at all. No site/program is too big for Microsoft to torpedo. Skype used to be the verb for voice calls before they got their hands on it.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 weeks ago

I didn't say MS would make it successful. They would definitely buy it, add Minecraft to it, integrate teams, then forget they bought it, neglect it, and leave it more broken than when they found it.

[+] NeoToasty@kbin.melroy.org 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] maplebar@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah I don't know why it took people so fucking long to realize that being on Twitter does nothing other than help the oligarchs, but here we are...

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Bluesky have two things over Mastodon:

-Money for a big marketing campaign, and reaching famous people.

-A better first comer UX.

First one is hard to solve. But UX in Mastodon should be solved. Local and federated feeds are useless, specially on the "default" .social instance. They need to find a way for new users to be able to see a relevant feed of toots and to have an easier time finding people they'd like to interact with.

It is a solvable problem, I hope someday it could be done.

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[–] EntasaurusWrecked@lemm.ee 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I was never a big tweeter, but I find Bluesky to be friendlier in general, and I'm digging it :)

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I think a lot of the future of social media is going to be determined by ease of use/beginner-friendliness.

The issue (and strength) with Lemmy is there's multiple instances. You're not gonna be able to explain it to non-technical people, even as an experienced programmer myself I sometimes find myself getting confused by Lemmy. People don't want to learn, they just want to use something that works.

Then again, KBin only had the one instance pretty much I think, and yet that died out anyway. So I think part of it is people just want to go where everyone else is, and that did end up being Lemmy and not KBin (although the maintainer of KBin also refused outside contributions which helped seal its fate lol)

If Bluesky has the one instance, and you literally just go to bsky.app and sign up, that's going to be a lot easier than trying to sell people on Mastodon or Lemmy when they Google those. Then again, I just googled Mastodon and it took me right to Mastodon.social so maybe I am mistaken.

[–] aluminium@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Now you have everyone right of center on one Platform and everyone left of center on the other. Great ...

[–] Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world 17 points 2 weeks ago

Exactly. They're abusive assoles. Fuck them. We're outa there.

[–] nexguy@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Why do people of different political leanings need to be in the same entertainmart platform?

[–] JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

They're social platforms, not entertainment, and it's to prevent echo chambers

[–] PrivacyDingus@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

the right's echo chambers (X, Truth Social) seem to have done very well for their abilities to succeed as a movement

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