Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/11/24293920/bluesky-700000-new-users-week-x-threads

162 124 2 years ago

bhouston• 2 years ago

I can attest that BlueSky is really nice right now. Feels less combative than Twitter. I started to use it 25 days ago and got 400 or so follows pretty quickly.

I am here: https://bsky.app/profile/benhouston3d.bsky.social

I used this tool to find accounts that match on both platforms:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...

adzm• 2 years ago

Agreed, it's a really fun community. I hope it lasts

owlninja• 2 years ago

The only thing keeping me around as someone who never comments or tweets, is that there are some great local accounts (to me) like weather, police, news, concerts, etc... Any chance these move over? I'm not looking for some great community, I just enjoy timely posts I guess.

krapp• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, Bluesky being the "popular" alternative just means it's going to turn to shit faster.

I have an account there because so many people seem to be moving from Twitter to Bluesky instead of Mastodon, for understandable reasons, but I expect Bluesky to be be awash in bots, AI and Nazis within a year. That's just the way things go now.

mardifoufs• 2 years ago

It's also one of the least diverse communities I've seen. Almost everyone is white and western, twitter is extremely diverse in comparison.

KPGv2• 2 years ago

Following you, and hope to finally spend more time on the butterfly app instead of the bird app since it seems enough people are moving over there. I managed to primarily use Mastadon for a few months at one point but got sucked back into TWT.

sohkamyung• 2 years ago

Whenever people mention 'bird app', I think it's is ebird. Now, 'butterfly app' makes me think of iNaturalist. :-)

http://ebird.org/

https://www.inaturalist.org/

elfbargpt• 2 years ago

https://x.com/AmericanGwyn/status/1856128159130812866

caeril• 2 years ago

Feels less combative than Twitter.

Echo chambers are, by default, less combative.

As Twitter becomes more hiveminded, you can expect it to become less combative, as well.

mingus88• 2 years ago

What evidence do you have that bluesky is already an echo chamber? Serious question as I haven’t used it yet.

Could it also be that people who left Twitter are simply less politically minded, and by definition will be less combative if they get to focus on their interests instead of their differences?

I left Twitter in 2017 because I was only there to get one liner jokes from professional comedians and follow some record label releases. I’m not joining any platform where memes and other low quality opinions are the primary modes of communication

kccoder• 2 years ago

It seems the combativeness of Twitter has increased with it becoming more hivemindy, not the other way around. The people leaving twitter are generally less combative than those staying / joining, so I imagine it will devolve further into a pit of rabid fighting dogs.

Similarly, I expect Trump and Elon will have a falling out rather quickly. Two megalomaniacal narcissists don't generally play nicely for very long. When that happens, Elon won't be able to help himself from whacking the bees nest he's created, by criticizing Trump. I expect the combativeness of twitter to skyrocket soon afterwards.

theasisa• 2 years ago

I used Twitter mainly to follow fellow devs, industry leaders and InfoSec people. But after Elon made changes my timeline started to fill with politics and culture wars and it ended up missing me less informed and more angry.

Maybe that is the future for BlueSky as well, but at the moment I am enjoying it and more people I followed on Twitter are making the move.

JeremyNT• 2 years ago

I like it a lot too, and my feed is pretty good. Unfortunately adoption is really slow and few of the really famous people I'd like to follow seem to care about it.

The network effects of Twitter/X are just incredibly powerful. Even many people who ostensibly dislike the fact that it has become a right wing propaganda tool seem reluctant to actually leave.

johneth2• 2 years ago

The network effects are powerful, but anecdotally I've noticed fewer and fewer people I follow actually posting anything to Twitter.

I think there'll be a tipping point where nobody of value is posting enough for anybody else to bother checking in, death spiralling its usefulness. It's already 80% bots, grifters, and engagement farmers.

6bb32646d83d• 2 years ago

I just scrolled 5mn on the landing page of bluesky, unlogged, and it looks like r/politics (mostly anti-Trump, anti-Musk posts).

Hardly appealing for someone like me who goes on twitter less because there's too much politics

verdverm2• 2 years ago

You have to curate your discover feed, like joining any new platform with a recommendation engine. The nice thing is there are many custom feeds for various topics beyond the singular main feeds (discover, following, friends) and you can write your own and use it from their app.

minimaxir6• 2 years ago

Unlike previous attempts for groups of people trying to leave Twitter/X post-Elon acquisition for a competitor social network but failed due to the difficulty of getting all their friends to also switch, this time it might actually stick.

Even before the election results on Tuesday, the vibes on X have been steadily been getting worse from my perspective, and the fact that Musk will get more power and influence from a Trump win may have been its Digg 2.0 moment.

I have replaced my Twitter contact information in my HN profile with my Bluesky contact info, and will be doing the same on my personal website soon.

infotainment• 2 years ago

Ehhh, at this point people have been predicting the downfall of X/Twitter for so long such predictions feel a bit meaningless.

Twitter was always terrible and I was hopeful Elon’s mismanagement would finally destroy it, but I think its clear that its never going anywhere.

threeseed5• 2 years ago

Fidelity who invested in X have said it's worth 20% since Musk took over.

So it definitely is dying. It will just take another year or two.

dawnerd2• 2 years ago

it was never going to die overnight though. It's had a steady decline since the takeover.

bsimpson• 2 years ago

As someone who was on Reddit when we got the influx of Digg users, it's wild that "Digg moment" is now an anachronistic culture reference like "Betamax" or "jumping the shark" was for me when I was younger.

I'm sure there's a huge cohort of people active here have never heard of Digg except that it was a thing that fumbled and made Reddit bigger.

Nimitz14• 2 years ago

How does it compare to threads?

minimaxir6• 2 years ago

Threads has become worse over time due to a series of anti-user policy decisions (no news/politics) and a very weird Discover algorithm that strongly incentivizes clickbait (and said feed is the default on the app and cannot be changed)

throwaway290• 2 years ago

Does federation work? Or Threads just doesn't federate anything into itself?

GaggiX2• 2 years ago

Also no porn, since Twitter is the only mainstream platform that allows porn, a real competitor would have to allow porn as well.

duxup4• 2 years ago

no news/politics

I kinda like the IDEA there, but no idea how you separate things like “I’m concerned about my individual rights” from politics?

And usually when people say “no politics” they mean “no politics I don’t like “.

Still in sympathize with the idea, I want to hear from people about what they’re doing and so forth, not a rehash of the news.

forgotoldacc3• 2 years ago

Threads only fed me straight up celebrity posts, despite having absolutely zero interest in that, when I signed up back when it was new. I can't imagine how much worse it is now.

threeseed5• 2 years ago

a) Given what happened with X during the election, Meta unquestionably made the right call with Threads. If you want news/politics then simply follow your desired journalists. But forcing it on people who don't want it is not making the world better. It's just allowing bad actors a clear vector on how to make it worse.

b) You can switch to the chronological feed which is much better. But as you say you can't make it the default.

tokioyoyo• 2 years ago

The problem with Threads is, in my opinion, lack of funny people. it won’t be able to attract those users because what they usually post is questionable at best. And without it, it will always feel too sterile.

From what I can see, bsky mostly consists of rebels. And since users flock where everyone else is, it will be an uphill battle for them to get Twitter’s userbase.

sph3• 2 years ago

There are two types of social media sites: the niche one nobody uses, and the ones @dril posts on.

shubhamjain• 2 years ago

It's beyond words how much Elon Musk has wrecked Twitter. But, I am not ready join another echo chamber that mirrors the same flaws from the other side of the spectrum. My initial impression of BlueSky is just that.

Twitter's greatest flaw—no, I won’t call it "X"—is its obsession with engagement to promote tweets. This creates the worst feed you can think of:

- People ask the dumbest questions, just to bait responses.

- Someone makes a reasonable point, and along comes the dumbest reply. Why? So others can pile on, calling them out, driving up engagement.

- External links are buried. Good articles? Forget it. They’ve vanished from my feed.

- The most toxic people are constantly pushed to my feed. And it's a losing battle to block them all. Keeping my feed politics-free is borderline impossible.

- The fact that you can buy a subscription and ensure that your tweets get highlighted more is absurd. It has made it really easy to get the worst accounts in your feed.

It’s exhausting. I am just there because I think it is still a good marketing channel. But I am not sure anymore if the pros outweigh the cons.

rapsey• 2 years ago

I do not understand how people have this problem. Follow interesting people and look at the following tab. Unfollow or mute uninteresting or annoying people.

I find it great because there is a ton of interesting people. It is not a website for discussions, it is for one off messages.

skygazer• 2 years ago

I installed some guy's userscript to remove the For You tab all together and dump me straight into Following. It's way better, but it's still out of order, so you can't see what's new, only a random selection of what's popular from the last few days, which is irritating. My workaround is to create a list named Timeline, and add all my follows to it and pin it up top, and poof, sequential timeline again, with none of the crap. Then just some css to hide inline ads and constant upgrade nags, and it's like 2014 again.

medler• 2 years ago

The great thing about bluesky is that there are no “algorithms” by default. You see posts from people you follow in the order they were posted. There’s no feed pushing toxic posts in your face, and since there’s no monetary incentive for engagement, you don’t see the egregious bait that’s ubiquitous on Twitter.

As for it being an echo chamber, that’s a function of who chooses to join. Again, there are no algorithms, so no viewpoints are favored by the site (unlike on some other sites, ahem). And the protocol ensures you can’t really be banned.

dandellion• 2 years ago

Whenever I see an article about this or that platform gaining a million users I always think of the Eternal September.

I'd like to see a platform where after a certain number of people join, a new server is automatically created and new users are redirected there, similar to how MMO servers worked.

minimaxir6• 2 years ago

MMO servers splits were due to capacity (both for the server and the player's weak GPUs trying to render players in a crowded area), not due to community. Modern World of Warcraft, for example, has removed almost every server-specific barrier and has strongly benefitted from it.

Everdred2dx• 2 years ago

I think what OP is suggesting is that this technical barrier artificial as it may have been helped foster community. I feel the same way as them!

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

The non-death of Twitter looks like it's keeping the Eternal September quarantined there. Leaders and early adopters are finding new spaces, the passive and undiscerning may not follow this time. If they've put up with this much crap, what would make them leave?

behnamoh• 2 years ago

I've seen this played out many times and won't fall into the "next big social media site" trap anymore. If anything, I've noticed people are moving away from public social media and towards more private sites (only sharing photos and stuff with family members and close friends). The days of "let's put it out there for the entire world to see" are over.

RiverCrochet2• 2 years ago

Apps that work like Discord and Telegram are the social media of the future.

duxup4• 2 years ago

My complaint about Bluesky is that it is too much like twitter.

Admittedly I ran into less straight forward combativeness and that’s nice.

But still the content was just as inane and hot take heavy.

Granted I accept that “pretty much another twitter” is what the users want.

forgotoldacc3• 2 years ago

Bluesky is pretty decent so far. I get about as many responses to my art as I do with twitter, despite having 1/5th the followers on the new platform.

The problem is I don't see much interesting on Bluesky. It's endless people saying "Hello, bluesky! I'm new here!" or "Hello, new bluesky users! Follow me!" Feels like there's less focus on content and more on the individuals themselves. It's further exemplified with weird stuff like "Bulgarian game devs with webbed toes between the ages of 33 and 47 Starter Pack". These starter packs get spammed nonstop and it makes it feel very cliquey, with lots of them being groups that had some degree of twitter "influence" trying to bring it over to Bluesky as-is and without others butting in.

Another thing that's strange to me is that lots of bluesky users post selfies almost nonstop and half of users have selfies as their profile photos. Which, I mean, that's their right. But I feel like with twitter, nobody cared what you looked like or what your background was.

I post on both, but I mainly browse twitter despite having no fondness for the dude running it. I never interact with political slop on twitter so its algorithm only suggests me incredible art. I never interact with selfies but bluesky keeps throwing them at me. Like, no, I really do not care about your cute new lipstick or whatever. I don't care about political hot takes. I just want to see art. And like 50% of it is art. But the other 50% is an endless feed of "look at me! As in literally, look at my face!" that I just cannot get rid of.

Maybe someday the novelty of it being the "new" thing will fade and the selfie obsessed people will go away while content will rise up, like it did with twitter. I hope so.

RiverCrochet2• 2 years ago

Bluesky is pretty decent so far.

It is in pre-enshittification phase.

The problem is I don't see much interesting on Bluesky.

You have to search for things, follow a few people, and give the "Discover" facility something to work with I think. Also use the Feeds tab - search may bring up some feeds which are also super helpful.

forgotoldacc3• 2 years ago

I've tried the other tabs and feeds. I follow a decent number of people, too.

When I delve into art or gamedev feeds and whatnot, I'm still hit in the face with selfies and people talking way too much about their personal life. I feel like I really need to dig for content, whereas with twitter, the top 10 things I see upon every refresh is some great art.

I know lots of artists have left it permanently for bluesky, and I try to follow them whenever they leave, but there's still a massive imbalance in the quality of content that the algorithm feeds and it's heavily in favor of twitter.

numpad0• 2 years ago

It is in pre-enshittification phase.

Totally agreed on this part, and, this lead me to a weird thought: maybe we're witnessing human adaptation of "[the users] are the product" phenomenon. Twitter the product was sold to a rich kid way over valuation and in form it can't be used commercially, like a consumer branded prepackaged food that are too blatant to serve at a restaurant.

IOW, it was sold at profit, with no opportunities left on the table. And a new instance of the product is being manufactured.

What I'm trying to say is, I think there is a chance that that's just how enshittification, social media, freemium-minus-mium model, etc works from this point on, as if it's junk food made of DAU.

drivingmenuts• 2 years ago

All of that more or less describes the early days of Twitter, before it became Xitter.

raxxorraxor• 2 years ago

Another thing that's strange to me is that lots of bluesky users post selfies almost nonstop and half of users have selfies as their profile photos.

Honestly that sounds like it could be bots. Although maybe it is just people making new accounts.

dheerosaur• 2 years ago

Perhaps they make it easy to upload a selfie in their onboarding.

runarberg• 2 years ago

Here is a graph where someone actually measured the engagement across the two platforms, and it backs your suspicion that engagement level per follower is much higher on BlueSky than on Twitter:

https://bsky.app/profile/andrewdessler.com/post/3laphnufp222...

caseyy• 2 years ago

https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/

fady0• 2 years ago

This is hilarious, thank you for the good laugh.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

My hypothesis is still that the problem isn't Twitter per se, but that Twitter-like failure modes are built in to that structure. A communications platform that has certain qualities will tend to become Twitter-like: Many-to-many, short messages, reposting, etc. These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors. So, that would predict Bluesky having many of the same problems as Twitter sooner or later.

EasyMark• 2 years ago

I never thought twitter was a failure until Musk introduced $8 “pump you to the top” blue check accounts, then that’s when the bots -really- moved in because they knew they could pump propaganda for a small fee and get far more traction than they every could by setting up bot armies that were easy to detct. Bsky will be fine as long as they try to control the bots.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

I guess I didn't define what I think the problems with Twitter are, and now I don't have time for a long message. But, in short, I think that format encourages echo chambers, shortens attention spans, and rewards bad behaviors like bullying, cheap shots, ungenerous reading, etc. None of those are directly related to bots (though maybe bots are a symptom of the same issues). Nor did they emerge with Musk. That Elon Musk wanted to control Twitter might even be diagnostic of a certain kind of basic problem with it—or a basic power—but I'd have to think about that a little more.

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

Twitter had such a strong home team of people trying to monitor the network health.

And they seemed committed to giving researchers and academics lots of access to understand and share how the network was working, look for disinformation & "foreign influence" campaigns.

Now there's no one at the helm and all the researchers and civic interests have been given the boot. They are being threatened by ExTwitter to the tune of 1.5c per tweet accessed if I remember correctly. These people were helping you but there's this sense that finding out what's happening is risky for business, that it could hurt, when in fact the network is just being overrun, turned into the maelstrom, and is deeply into rot and decay stages.

sfasdf1• 2 years ago

Not mean to offend you but many people have come up with the same statement. It is pretty cliche by now.

caskstrength• 2 years ago

These are mechanics that will just create certain kinds of behaviors.

Yes, but if platform API allows using customizable third-party clients it is not really a problem for me (e.g. I can just enable chronological timeline, filter out all the ads and noise).

RamenJunkie_2• 2 years ago

Yeah, except Twitter has no moderation anymore, in fact isnhas the opposite problem where people can pay to force their crappy views on everyone with blue checks.

Twitter isn't the problem, Musk is the problem. Twitter was fine until he took over. Bluesky is Twitter - Musk.

verdverm2• 2 years ago

What makes Bluesky different is ATProto. The four core components (data hosting, app view, algo feed, moderation) are all separate, pluggable, and open for anyone to implement their own.

What that means is moving is easy, meaning competition is possible, without the need to migrate platforms and rebuild followings and the network. Beyond that, ATProto supports custom record types, so one can build all the social media application types (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Substack, ...) on the same social media fabric (ATProto)

I'm inclined to say the custom record type is a fifth core component that now exists thanks to ATProto. Monetization hasn't been widely discussed yet, Bluesky team has something besides ads in mind, but haven't publicly disclosed.

mongol• 2 years ago

I deleted my Twitter account a few days ago. I am so disappointed in what became of Musk as he teamed up with Trump and I don't want to support him any more. Of course it does not make a dent in his life, but for mine it does. The time I save I can do more useful things with. I aim to consume less and produce more. or consume more long-form media, like books, or actual newspapers. It will be better for my mood I think, to decouple myself from current events unless they are really significant. So what is the relationship of this to Bluesky? That I am not keen on trying it. I will attempt this change of focus seriously. I will not just change ships, I will stay in my new destination.

npteljes• 2 years ago

That's a wholesome change, I feel. I also disconnect from social and news from time to time. The quickly refreshing content on the internet is very tempting, but it's more toxic than not, beginning with its very nature of being quickly refreshed. The churn is too high to engage in quality, and so if quality is desired, focus on the real and immediate environment is what pays off more, even if much less engaging.

Simulacra• 2 years ago

I tried to service, but it felt buggy, and I just didn't feel there was a need to switch full-time. I'm using social media a lot less, i'm trying to navigate blue sky makes me want to use it even less.

FooBarBizBazz• 2 years ago

Everybody forgets that Twitter created Trump.

They remember fondly when left-crazy ruled Twitter. They forget that the opposite and more-enduring right-reaction formed as part of the same dynamic.

If Twitter had never existed, Donald Trump would still just be playing a rich guy on The Apprentice, and licensing his name to developers of hotels and colognes. Elon Musk would just be pushing electric cars and rockets and solar panels.

Which is why this effort to rebuild Twitter as BlueSky is not good news.

I know it seems that we all need to develop a fever again to dislodge Trump. I don't think we do. Incumbents have gotten wrecked all over the place. The world is not getting better. Four years from now, Team Trump will be the incumbents, and the voters will express their dissatisfaction again. This will happen without efforts to make society start boiling over again. Those will just cause more blowback. We don't need another Twitter.

andrewinardeer• 2 years ago

I think a more important stat is what percentage of new users in Week n has logged in again after Week n + 56 days.

bradgessler• 2 years ago

A few things I like about BlueSky:

1. Your username can be your domain name. I’m @bradgessler.com, which means I can build more “equity” in my domain than I can on other platforms. It’s also really great for brands or open source projects that have their own website.

2. Lots of technical folks have come over from Twitter and the signal to noise ratio is much better. There’s less weird random videos, less people screaming past each other, less porn bots.

3. When I share a link on Bluesky, it doesn’t get penalized.

4. It’s a global namespace so I don’t have to worry about what server people are on that I want to follow. I struggled with this on Mastodon.

5. The UI is as good as Twitter. There’s been a few times now where I forget what network I’m using by just looking at the app.

6. Starter packs are handy to bring folks from your communities over. I created one for Ruby devs at https://go.bsky.app/HXB2cPh and one for companies built on Ruby at https://go.bsky.app/JQyXa2u

I fully expect Bluesky to become completely enshitified over time, but I think it’s going to have a pretty good run for a while. They’re doing a lot of things right and it has fun early Twitter vibes, but without the fail whale.

the_third_wave• 2 years ago

With so many disgruntled "democrat" supporters moving from X to BS the question is what will keep BS from ending up like the same echo chamber Twitter was before it was forcibly opened up to the deplorables, garbage, irredeemables and other *-phobes and *-ists. Does the platform have a way to keep the window of allowed discourse open to all or will this simply end up recreating Twitter, warts and all?

amai2• 2 years ago

Can I import my old data from Twitter to Bluesky?

matteogauthier• 2 years ago

Yes you can, with this web extension https://github.com/kawamataryo/sky-follower-bridge

amai2• 2 years ago

Ok, so I can port the lists of user I follow. But all my old Twitter posts will be inaccessible to me if I close my Twitter account, right?

Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week

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