Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.
Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform’s entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.
The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website “Bluesky Stats.” Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.
It’s impossible to know whether Musk’s comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.
Nostr is the easiest to use decentralized Twitter alternative I’ve came across.
Vbe. T. Cv. C n vbubvcui… Vnx, a, a t. a. Chào. X x ih. X, nhưng, it’s x u. But v v b
How the hell do you even sign up
I think you have to be invited to join BS (fnar!).
Yeah that’s why I’m wondering how the heck are they signing up
Users who already have accounts on Bluesky get access codes they can give out to others over time. You don’t even need to open the app to earn access codes. You just need an account.
Basically, as the devs let more and more people in, the platform will experience exponential growth. If the devs let in one person, that one person can let in 5 more in just 2 months time, and those 5 can let in 5 more each, and so on.
Why the hell Bluesky is still invite only is beyond me. They killed their hype during the most important time, during multiple Twitter exoduses. People wanted to swap to it but couldn’t. They were so desperate that Threads got 100m users really quick, just because people so badly wanted a Twitter alternative. Invite only doesn’t even provide any benefit.
Bluesky doesn’t apparently have all the user safety tools that it needs before opening the flood gates.
Wow we have a lot in common, neither does Lemmy lol
Artificial scarcity.
That’s the only real reasons anybody goes the invite-only route, (that and extremely lazy moderation) it’s mainly to create FOMO for popularity. That’s also why they aren’t publicly visible and require you to login to view posts.
Mastodon or bust!
Literally. The android app is superb. It has come a long way with Material You theming, smoothness, and stuff. Compare that to the crap you would call twitter, X or whatever.
Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days
Edit: Source: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
Hard to convince people. The twittersphere has fractured into about 4 different places, and masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.
Honestly I think Mastodon needs a third party app that makes it feel more like Twitter, similar to how reddit apps are switching to lemmy. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there were any third party Twitter apps that had the name recognition of the reddit ones.
THere were a few but they got bought (eg. tweetdeck).
There are also 3rd party apps for mastodon that a lot of people like, and they try. But for many people, mimicking the parts of Twitter they value is difficult to do without proper backend support for supporting algorithms, and even then the way activitypub works it still makes it difficult to support for most developers.
Two of the key features are discovering new or related content, which is hard to do in mastodon as it needs to calculate similarity across all of the profiles and their content in order to make recommendations – or collect data like your cell contacts to help you connect with people you already know. Most people don’t want contact sharing, and indexing all of the recommended profiles, especially across federated servers is challenging.
The second is engagement based recommendations. Many social media users aren’t incredibly active. They want to open the app in specific moments to quickly catch up with everything since they last opened the app. To do this well, you need to know what they’ve engaged with and look back at content since they last logged on and rank it based on that. People may follow 1000 people, but really care about maybe 30-40 accounts the most. Friends, family, specific journalists or famous people. Mastodon just gives you like a sample of the last 50 or so items. If you follow anyone super active, you may just get a lot of noise in those updates.
Obviously, there are times when everyone wants a linear timeline, but it depends upon their daily use.
masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.
And? Servers are inter-operable.
Until your home instance defederates from another instance. Sure, you can always make another account, but your average user wants a lower friction experience.
I’m reasonably active in the fediverse, but I recognize that the more explaining it takes to the average user the less likely they’re going to want to join in.
The old old top gear cool wall tried to hit on this concept. You could have a very technically excellent car classified as uncool because if you had to explain why it was cool to a normie you had already lost them.
It will be hard for the fediverse to get over this hump, which is probably why you see so many Linux users here and so few say woodworkers or other (somewhat) more niche communities.
That’s a good point. Branding is done for a reason. When I buy a car, I don’t need to know which companies made each and every component, it’s enough for me to know that “Audi” made it.
I guess if someone made an easy entry-point for users to sign up, that became the defacto way to start with Lemmy, then it would have a lower barrier to entry. Maybe it asks them some likes/dislikes, and then it would route them to the most appropriate instance to sign up.
Most average people would never notice defederation unless you told them. It’s pretty frictionless and drama free.
The niche communities are always the last to come. It’s why they’re niche. That techie people are the first is nothing damming. It’s always been that way for every service.
That the normie can’t just sign up and figure it out by using it is the problem. We have too many stupid and lazy people
Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw
Why would anyone think Bluesky is any better than Twitter? There are no fundamental differences.
Huh I wonder why
I’m so glad people are calling Bluesky out for the trash service it is. I just mastodon outlasts this crap and we get more people on there than bluesky
What’s wrong with Blue sky?
It’s still a centralized. Single owner platform. Srop making assholes into millionaires
Oh, but mastodon doesn’t have a good algorithm like Twitter it is hard to switch
The whole point of Mastodon not having an algorithm to show you things is to put the user in control of what kind of content they want to see.
Why do you need an algorithm to tell you what you are interested in? You go on Mastodon and subscribe to what you want to.
Mastodon has algorythms. Otherwise it couldn’t display the posts in the right orders, by example.
You’re right. That word has always been kind of dumbly used as a replacement for something like, “feed manipulation controlled by corporate interests”. Every computer application uses algorithms in some way.
Because it’s hard to find things, the normal person is used to an algorithm
I remeber Facebook before algorithms took over.
You friended and followed things, and then you’d see content from those things only in either chronological order or by recent activity. People loved it and as “the algorithm” took over people complained that they were no longer being served the content they wanted and expected and were also seeing content they did not want to see from stuff they had never followed or shared interest in.
Fuck the magical algorithm that’s tailored to serve me divisive content because that is what drives the most engagement. Or serves me content to sway my political and moral opinions to the benefit of some wannabe oligarch or government entity (looking at you TikTok/CCP).
Yeah, but they work until someone decides to fuck it up. Federation isn’t the holy grail you think it is.
Admins (often a very very small group if not a single person managing an instance) still make unilateral decisions about federation and content or the very existence of that instance, and if your home instance suddenly defederates or goes poof, too bad, time to start over on a different instance with a new account with the exact same risks or maintain multiple accounts.
If this sounds familiar, it’s awfully similar to what reddit did with their API by cutting off access points to content which is why most of us are here. Same shit, different shade of brown.
Having been active on mastodon.lol and watching it get shuttered because the admin didn’t have teeth in the game shows how dangerously fragile the fediverse can be. My engagement with Mastodon as a whole has been less since mastodon.lol shut down. You can move accounts but you can’t move posts and 301s only work until the instance is gone.
I have to agree. Federation only goes a little way on the path to a proper decentralized social media system. Ideally, defederation should not be possible, and rather, community subscription should be the norm without concern over what instance it exists on.
I’m not saying it should become Usenet, but it should be more similar to Usenet than it is now.
Still not the same
CEO is a musk toesucker.
And of cource i misread that as “CEO is Mr. mark toesucker”
If you run “Mark Zuckerberg” through google translate a few dozen times I’m sure it’ll spit that out at some point
God I hope he gets gaslit into actually making Twitter a subscription. It would be so funny
what the fuck is Bluesky
It’s also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.
I want to like it but they refuse to open up the platform still after Twitter keeps handing them opportunity after opportunity and I’m afraid their chances to succeed are going to wane.
They’re focusing on scaling and moderation tools that can handle federation better (especially spam management), they don’t think that’s ready yet. But you can federation it in their sandbox environment
Yeah, I suspected this would be a real point of no return. Mastodon will also benefit, but naturally the fediverse isn’t the first thing people think of. Fortunately, Mastodon has been working on this.
Who is the target audience for BlueSky?BlueSky’s tech isn’t as open or developed as the alternatives though, is it?Edit:
Not sure why I asked that first question, answer’s obvious, so it was more out of frustration I think. Sort of in a similar way towards people moving to Threads or any other corporate social media again after getting screwed before.it’s invite only, which first makes you think, “oh cool - no spammers!”
but then you realize you just need one spammer to get in and now they only invite spammers, and control their invites… as a form of spam! Flooding the net with “cheap” invite codes (only $10!) and multiplying.
Invite only makes people think no spammers? Have they never been in any space with minimal obstacles to entry like that? Any place people are, there’s going to be someone or some activity you don’t care for.
Makes me think of folks thinking there will be fewer annoying people in online games with sub fees. 😂
Seems pretty easy to control though.
Once spammer is detected, you just ban them and the account that invited, all the way up a down that invite tree.
And in the process nuke every legitimate user who may have used their codes, great way to build trust in a new platform. You can’t even vet users to see if they are spammers or not because you need an account to view the service.
Wellp, Nintendo intentionally breaks their own games if you pirate their stuff. Not allowing bribes is a simmlar looking situation. “This product is defective the last person who had their hands on it mustve screwed it up somehow.”
Nintendo intentionally breaks their own games if you pirate their stuff.
I’m not aware of them doing this all that often. In fact, it’s more something that game developers do from time to time, rather than Nintendo specifically. The classic one being when they introduce a bug that only affects the pirated release, then every time they get a report on that bug they know the user pirated their copy.
Yeah I’m not sure what exactly they’re referring to. if they’re referring to the N64 games that was the developer Rare who did it, not Nintendo, Nintendo is just the publisher. If it’s related to Switch games then it’s possible they’re referring to Online only games or the many many Piracy-related myths as well as disinformation that plagues the Switch Modding scene to this day.
Invite only is a technique that becomes a hinderance and gimmic after about 100k members.
Not sure if I’m getting suckered into conspiracy theories with regards to Elon, the Saudis, Russia and Twitter but this article has an interesting (albeit extreme) take on the matter.
“No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating.”
https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d
Medium is a bad source but there’s truth that Bluesky’s CEO is a musk toesucker.
Underrated link
100% - Allied partners.
Strange to measure it against an invite only site, I would love to sign up but I haven’t been able to find invites. I think between Mastodon, Bluesky & Threads via ActivityPub (eventually) will get most of my communities back.
I love Mastodon & prefer it in many ways but there just aren’t enough people there. The tech & dev community is lively, everything else is essentially non-existent.
And why Threads instead of Mastodon if you belive it will use ActivityPub.
The tech & dev community is lively, everything else is essentially non-existent.
Broners are pretty active there. Biggest instance is equestria.social, some people use or run smaller instances, some use GP instances.
Threads has momentum and easy signups, it’s simple for people. I wouldn’t use it myself directly but I’m sure it would help expand the communities that are available via a Mastodon client.
It’s a convenience article. They’re just reporting some number they have access to.
Do you want one? I have a spare.
Sure, that would be amazing. Thank you!
I just realized I have no idea how to pm someone on here
Not sure via the mobile apps, and there are so many. From the regular Lemmy web interface, you just tap their name anywhere which takes you to their profile and then tap “Send Message” in the top right corner.
Found it!
