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.
Glad cracker musk is losing money over this, I just wish people wouldn’t just jump into the next boiling pot because the current one got too hot.
Anything in form of competition is good imho.
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.
It’s also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.
Excuse me, signups on an INVITE ONLY platform?
I have few invites if anyone needs
Would appreciate one :)
bsky-social-ylgua-e7m7l
I think other miscreants have already swiped it :(
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I d like one if you can spare one
I’d like one if still available, please.
bsky-social-6yprh-qgtd3
If you still have any, I’d appreciate one.
I could make use of one of those invites. Thank you.
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Any chance you have any more? I’d love one
Ot makes no sense,
And Threads?
I refuse to touch anything related to Facebook. I’m shocked that people would use Threads or Instagram for that matter.
Or Mastodon?
I’d bet mastodon saw an increase, but i haven’t seen the numbers.
It’s also hard to get a good count since it’s not centralized. So whatever numbers we do see, could be wildly underreported.
Yes, I also want to know how it is affecting the Mastodon user base.
You can check on fediverse growth anytime on fediDB, though not with daily granularity.
I found this which has registrations and posts for mastodon / fediverse over hour / day / week / month but it breaks it out by instances so can be a bit difficult to tell overall. Here’s mastodon in the last 7 days for example.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
You can see a spike in the last couple days. We went from about 30k/week to a 50k+ in this past week.
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Although it looks like this is 3 days behind.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount I discovered this after searching abit
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days
Edit: Source: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw
isn’t bluesky invite only?
Invite only is a fascinating choice for a social network that requires network effect to succeed.
Gmail is the most famous/successful example but interesting to note that email is a federated network that can interoperate with every other email address too.
What about this bluesky network?
I’ve been trying to get an invite since June.
Apparently if you ask, you’re not good enough or some shit.
You’re not missing anything. I eventually got an invite, found that 40% of the content was furry and I deleted my account.
It says that in the first sentence
lol they didn’t even bother reading the lemmy description. 😂
Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.
So, in the shape of a pyramid? Sounds like a good business model. I wonder if anyone has ever done that before? (yes, it’s a joke)
Yup. I have a bunch of invites (for sane people only)
Uhh… I can’t prove I’m sane, but a DM would be nice…!
This guy is crazy! Don’t listen to him!
Welp. Was worth a shot…
If I could have one, I’m waiting for months now. :(
I would love one if you have a spare.
I requested an invite a couple of months ago when I downloaded the app. Wish someone would invite me!
I’d love an invite if it’s still available (:
I would love an invite if you have any left
Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.
In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that’s been way more successful than G+
Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn’t want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I’m certain they did that for technical reasons.
It’s also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.
Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.
“i am the choosen one!” As if…
Boy, our servers are ducktaped!
Might Bluesky be doing the same?
Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that “exclusive” feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.
So more Gmail than G+
Yeah they’re working hard on scaling, they’ve had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now
It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge.
You’re right, but for those who may not know the details or the impact at the time, Google was offering 500x more storage - at the free tier - than some of the competition - hotmail - who were charging people for just 10 MB of storage. This forced hotmail to increase its free tier to 250 MB and 2 GB for customers paying $20 USD/year.
It’s hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.
My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I’m sure that part would never change.
Gmail was also both “federated” and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn’t all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.
It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.
Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you’d get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.
And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.
IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, “WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?”. For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.
“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Hotmail was 2mb.
I’m still salty about that. Google+ was fantastic on release. Simple, clean, elegant, and fast. Then they steadily, systematically fucked it up. By the time it was cancelled, it had become unusable.
G+'s downfall was they kept it invite-only too long. Demand was there, people wanted in but Google was like, “Nah…”
By the time it was open-access, everyone had moved on or back to their old social media platforms. It could’ve been great, but Google, in typical Google fashion, got distracted by something shiny and killed it.
The sad thing is, if they’d thought even a tiny bit laterally and leveraged the fact that Google Reader was getting a lot of traction and a core of people were beginning to use its social functions, they could have backdoored themselves into being Digg/Reddit/Etc. and had the social media userbase to take on Facebook organically.
Instead, they fought the last war (Gmail vs Hotmail), intentionally eroded and then killed Reader, and with G+ they completely fucked up what was a cleaner interface (if not all that special) and a better technological experience, all while they were a brand that was at that time more trusted than their competitors.
Yep. Once they screwed up G+, I committed to never becoming dependent on any Google service beyond Drive and Gmail, and only those two because they’re completely untouchable - Google couldn’t break those without having a mass rebellion on its hands.
Yes but I’m sure many recorded invites and didn’t bother. Musk musking TSFKAT ( the-site-formerly-known-as-twitter) was the needed motivation to accept it.
I didn’t bother and was gonna give it a walk around. Downloaded but can’t access without an invite.
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I would prefer not to use the letter in any form.
Fuck Ruskie Muskie
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
Yes, that’s part of what’s surprising about the number.
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
I’ve been on the waitlist for awhile now. I don’t know anyone on it so I can’t get a code, unfortunately. Wish I was
I have some left, message me if you still need one.
Ooo me please :)
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I got an invite from the only person I actually know on it and it’s not bad. I’m interested, but still messing around with it to get the most out of it.
Waitlist? Are you in USSR?
Bluesky’s really highkey. You need an invite or gotta sit on the waitlist for months to get an account. Real elite stuff.
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.
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).
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.
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
If anyone has a Bluesky invite lying around, I wouldn’t mind a PM.
Pretty pleeease. 😁
Downvoted. Oops. Am I not allowed to ask that?
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I see it like this. Ignoring it won’t do me any good. It won’t go away. So better to see what it’s all about. Like so I can have an informed conversation.
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I do wonder how many are bots. Most of Twitter is bots anyway
rain is wet. hope they like starting new instances here. feel the fediverse creaking already
How is it on shakey ground, We may for a while just stay niche but active and high quality.
Can’t say I’ve felt any such issues. Probably comes down to you being on the biggest instance.
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.
