this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X (jewelcitytimes.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] maplebar@lemmy.world 9 points 1 hour ago (1 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 2 points 55 minutes ago* (last edited 42 minutes ago) (1 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 3 points 40 minutes ago* (last edited 37 minutes 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.

[–] cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

This shows how bad threads is.

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours 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

[–] NeoToasty@kbin.melroy.org 11 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

And they're doing this...after the election too.

Brain lapses, people.

[–] maplebar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour 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...

[–] thal3s@sh.itjust.works 18 points 4 hours 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 36 points 4 hours ago (1 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 5 points 2 hours 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.

[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago

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

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 37 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

How many does Threads have?

[–] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 15 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

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

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Threads has 275 million.

[–] cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

So basically .. ah

[–] kippinitreal@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago (4 children)

The "pseudo" federated platform. If it flops they will just tell everyone "federation s*cks" but BlueSky isnt federated at all

[–] FapFlop@lemmy.world 47 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Please don’t swear on the internet.

[–] OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 13 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

"Sucks" isn't even a swearword! Are we jst going to strt censoring normal w*rds now?

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago

I think sarcasm is dead.

[–] MichaelHawkinSnider@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

That'd be fuck*ng stupid.

[–] nickhammes@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Or perhaps fucking st*pid

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

H*y, fuck y*u p*l, m* k*ds ar* *n h*re.

[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 5 points 3 hours ago

My day is no longer fine

[–] Assman@sh.itjust.works 22 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Guarantee 99% of bluesky users have no idea what federation is

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 4 hours ago

Nor would they care if they knew about it.

[–] simplejack@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Most internet users have no idea what it is.

[–] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

You are probably right here in how news agencies and other competing sites would/might phrase it if BlueSky fails.

Though what bugs me and logically does not make sense (to me) is saying federation is what caused or could cause a site or service to fail.

Its like saying my new shinny website failed because of the Internet, the Internet must then be the problem.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Yeah i have the same feeling about it, but its like that buzzword AI. If AI company fails its always the "AI" but no one understood what AI did in that project.

[–] banghida@lemm.ee 5 points 5 hours ago

Then federate it.