Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²
Bluesky doesn’t have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million
Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can’t confirm it
Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹
Source:
Is this 30 million accounts created? Active user numbers would be a lot more meaningful.
As an illustration, if you have a platform that’s gaining 100,000 users each month and losing 100,000 other users each month, it’s basically going nowhere. But it will eventually reach this “30 million users” milestone too if all it means is account creations.
I wonder how many of the 30 million accounts are bots.
Active user numbers is probably less than 1 million, but still, 30 million accounts created is quite likely pretty good.
It’s something, but there’s really no frame of reference to know if it’s good or how good. Because companies rarely talk about this number. Twitter might have billions of accounts created if we look at all time.
Actives are what count.
Love an app that defaults me to people I actually follow and doesn’t bombard me with endless reams of ads or engagement bait.
We’ll see how long that lasts. But for now, its a blast from the past to be on a social media app I don’t hate.
1/10th the US population! Fantastic!
why are people frothing over Bluesky? this is just Twitter but owned by a different oligarch
No clue. Never found those platforms to be useful, just toxic.
Same here… even when Twitter was not even in the sights of fElon I found it to be super toxic. I signed up because “it was the best way to get the news” and left in about 4 days
They have an addiction to that kind of socials.
Because they learned nothing
Because it isn’t just Twitter. Nobody can buy the network, the same way nobody can buy email.
- Anyone can host a server.
- Anyone can make an app.
- Anyone can make an algorithm.
- Anyone can make a moderation service. Users can freely pick a server, app, algorithm, and moderation service.
Yeah, no, not anybody can host a server. Sure, you can host a PDS, but the AppView still wasn’t open source last time I looked, and hosting a relay requires tens of terabytes of storage, not to mention the bandwidth to keep up.
Meanwhile, people host actual activitypub instances on repurposed routers and their car entertainment system…
Ngl thanks for the detail, I went and had another look so correct me if I’m wrong.
- Anyone can host a open source PDS like the Bluesky PDS.
- Anyone can make an AppView to view these PDSs.
- Someone with many resources needs to host a relay.
- Also it seems that Bluesky is able to gatekeep access to its federation of PDSs on a per AppView basis? The details are a bit confusing.
So if we wanted to undermine Bluesky’s currently - hopefully temporary - centralised state, we would need multiple community modified PDSs, a widely rehosted open source AppView webapp & iOS/Android clients, a very expensive relay that is community controlled via non profit or something, and then we would be federated with each other and the bluesky infrastructure too?
Sounds like a lot of work just to recreate the user-end functionality of ActivityPub :/ Very confused why they felt the need to invent ATProtocol? I have heard some vague praise of it over AP but I think I’m not technical enough to really properly make that comparison. It’s nice that ATProtocol gives you ownership of your data though.
Perhaps Mastodon/ActivityPub-apps need to improve their onboarding process and user experience. Maybe include the custom feeds feature for Bluesky too. Something has to have gone wrong for Mastodon to have failed where Bluesky succeeded.
Yeah, why would I use BlueSky when I could just use my favorite platform named Threads?
Tap for spoiler
Just kidding
Try hosting your own instance and sorting through the content of 30m people for the one post you want. lol
This is so true. It costs more money for the server power required for something like that to be pulled off.
There’s a comment in this thread going all crazy complaining about it being costly to host anything on the protocol to stop Bluesky from dominating it and everything. But im like “uhh yeah, servers and storage costs money”.
It’s just so weird how everyone thinks hosting popular sites should be free.
Man, people love Left wing Gab.
The need to give everything a political stance these days is maddening and IMO very divisive.
When Bluesky was first launched in February 2023, it was an invite-only beta that required an invite code to register. Several prominent influencers and celebrities, including Breadtuber Twitch streamers were given referral codes to share with their audience. As a result, these codes were kept within these leftist spheres. So the user base is mainly Left wing. All I’m doing is calling spade a spade.
Oh it’s very left, the whole open web seems to lean that way. I just find it silly and not much different from what they claim right wing platforms to be. When I go out into the world social spaces aren’t left or right and for the most part we all get a long cordially. Bad eggs notwithstanding.
Man does not learn
6 more months before it monetizes…
Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.
another trash platform its just matter of a time, use mastodon and fediverse to don’t migrate again in few years
Mastodon and the fediverse are nerd shit with massive usability issues. Even I gave up on Mastodon and I would consider myself far more willing to put up with shit than the average user will ever be. The mass will - never - migrate to the fediverse and in many ways, especially looking at moderation issues, that is probably a good thing.
Good, I don’t need the mass. Social media is cancer anyways.
It’s sad but I agree. Lemmy works well, especially if you use third-party apps such as Voyager, but Mastodon… is so badly thought. I can navigate it because I’m a technical person, but normal people will never be able to understand how to use it, what are instances, why it asks me to type my instance when I want to follow someone, etc.
I love Mastodon. It’s easily my favorite & most-used social media platform right now.
But I’m also a huge damn nerd.
I honestly can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone that isn’t also a huge damn nerd, because they just won’t find stuff they want.
“You want sports? We don’t have much of that, but check out the Proxmox server in this guy’s basement!”
@RxBrad @mostlikelyaperson yeah, feel the same…
Well when I first start using facebook it was the same, the normies follow after if the platform is worth it🤣 I love Mastodon as well… I also have a Proxmox server in my basement.
The masses will either eventually migrate to ActivityPub, or have their entire digital lives consumed by oligarchs. It’s just a fight between finally deciding that maybe ease-of-use doesn’t mean “good,” and losing every ounce of your identity and ability to express your thoughts and feelings.
It’s interesting what a bubble lemmy users are in. There is a reason it is not taking off and did not replace reddit for many people that tried it. It’s way too daunting and confusing for the average user, same with mastodon.
And how many users does Mastodon have?
Roughly 10 million.
I would consider 1/3 a notable contender. Granted, only ~1 million of those users are active daily, but that’s still very significant for a FOSS alternative.
EDIT: Source
About a million active users each month
Edit: Damn, 10 million users, 1 million active daily, see other comment. My source was this, the one from the other comment is certainly more trustworthy https://adamconnell.me/social-media-platforms/#%3A~%3Atext=larger+social+network.-%2CStats%3A%2Cat+the+end+of+2022
which is less than bsky, but more than lemmy.
I think a lot of people get sucked into the idea that more is better. But that isn’t necessarily the case. I don’t think any of us really want to talk to a million different people anyway. We just want to talk to a suitable subset.
But with less people, the chance of you finding the subsets that interests you or fit your interests better is much lower, and that’s one of the main issue.
Does it have anything to do with crypto and decentralisation? I heard it did but it doesn’t seem like it does at all. Disappointing
Federation is too confusing for the average bear. the success of bsky is the best thing for getting people off twitter
It is the path of least resistance because it just goes in circles
This is the saddest, most insular cope I’ve read all day.
I’ve come to realize that bluesky already had all lot of what I’m happy to not see on masto. Good that there is a place for it to exist without me.
That content is also probably what the majority of people like about it.
Tried it last night for a hockey game. I still think I’m not using it correctly but people were nice.
There’s no right or wrong way. For it to be fun for an event like that you need to follow lots of people in that space. Like journalist, reporters, beat writers and analysts. However if you don’t want that content in your feed full time you could try searching one of the teams hashtags and use the latest tab to follow along. You can also take all those suggested follows and make a list to pin to your BlueSky front page without following them and just goto that feed during games.
Oh interesting, thanks! I figured out the hashtaga bit but a lot of fun popped up without the hashtaga etc.
I suppose I’ll just keep muddling along and figure something that works for me while trying to be a net positive influence!
Whenever I see how they keep getting brought up, I’m always reminded of that Dilbert ep about how people just fall for blue logos that are easy on the eyes. They don’t even have to know what it is… just the fact that the stupid logo is blue is enough. lol
Can I get the icon in cornflower blue? https://youtu.be/4NomQYQK1bE
Something similar is going to happen with lemmy if reddit keeps caving in to Elon
Na, we are a reduct… it’s a miracle we are on indexed web*
*/j
I find it odd that people follow Jack Dorsey into another sewer in troves. They seem to like the previous Twitter experiment, while I find it repugnant.
The lesson today is that I don’t get the social media phenomenon. My bad. I hope they have a ton of fun.
Jack Dorsey is not part of Bluesky, maybe you don’t get things because you don’t pay attention.
He’s already gone. But, regardless, why sign up for yet another corporate social media site when every single one of them becomes enshittified after a few years. Are they just planning to abandon Bluesky eventually too? Or just hoping that this time it’s different?
You say that as if any Mastodon instance was guaranteed to last several years.
The difference is that you can easily move to another Mastodon instance, and it’s designed so that when you do that your followers / followees come with you.
Except you can’t move your posts. Or, really, anything other than followers.
True, and this is something that Bluesky actually seems to do better. Your posts are stored in a “PDS” (personal data store), so in theory they’re not tied to any particular instance.
I hope that a future version of the Fediverse design / ActivityPub considers how to handle this issue. Still, I’d much rather lose my past posts than lose my social graph. Past posts can probably be archived, but it’s much harder to track down people you used to be mutuals with on a different account and follow each-other.
I didn’t like Twitter as a social platform, but I did use it a lot for news on current events, such as how is the traffic on my route home, and why am I stuck in traffic, and how many miles ahead of me is the fucking accident?
Handy for communication during some kind of emergency that floods the phone network, but that’s pretty niche. Anyway, I interact a little on Bluesky but mostly it’s just a time killer like TikTok or whatever. Twitter was super easy to quit between the Musk take over and moving away from DC.
such as how is the traffic on my route home, and why am I stuck in traffic, and how many miles ahead of me is the fucking accident
Any maps app, especially Google Maps, would do this as well.
Eh… what I really wanted to know was when they are going to clear the wreck and whether that stupid mother fucker died so I shouldn’t flip them off as I drive by. Can Google Maps tell me that?
I didn’t really want to out myself as the asshole wishing for someone’s death. But here we are.
Jack Dorsey has no involvement in Bluesky. He doesnt even have a Bluesky account.
He was the founder… I did not know he had left.
