Bluesky crosses the 15 million user mark

Bluesky: 15,128,928
Mastodon: 15,499,978

Source: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats and https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount

These numbers are to taken with a grain of salt. Mastodon in example can't count all instances, because not all are federated. Also on both instances we don't have numbers of active users per day or logged in at the same time. However Bluesky provides statistics beyond just the number of accounts. I'm not saying one is better or has more active users than the other, only that the total number of accounts can be misleading as much as the Megapixels count of your camera.

Edit: I forgot there is another statistics displaying the number of active users for Mastodon: above 2.5 million users. Also it displays current Mastodon user count less than 10 million. Again either it counts it differently or it does not have access to the same instances as the other account has. Source: https://mastodon-analytics.com/

Good. Still not completely sure about moving from one corporate site to another, but good to see more and more people are moving away from Twitter.

On one hand i love to see people fleeing Twitter, on another i think it foolish to move to another corporate site that eventually WILL enshittify. Here's Cory Doctorow on why he won't join Bsky or Threads
Bluesky Social is a public benefit corporation.
- Like OpenAI?
- That doesn't mean much unfortunately.
At least BlueSky is built on a technology based on open standard protocol and is decentralized. Kind of similar to the goals of Fediverse / Mastodon. So I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky? I don't know if this is possible. But in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.

My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse, so it becomes read from and write to relationship.
- is decentralized
  
  It's not.
  
  I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky?
  
  They can't.
  
  in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.
  
  ...yep.
  
  My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse.
  
  ActivityPub existed before BlueSky did and they chose to make their own, incompatible thing. So I don't have high hopes for this.
- Bluesky Social is a public benefit corporation.

i, for one. ain't one of those 15 million users nor am i likely to ever be

And that's why I like Bridgy Fed, I don't really like BlueSky neither (except nuclear block), but thanks to the bridge I can still interact with my friends from my Fediverse accounts, something that wouldn't be possible with Twitter for example

I signed up and made a post. I was shocked and then amused when somebody actually saw my post?! It made me realize I don't understand how to even use a Twitter type of social media. Do I just post my thoughts? What's up with that lol

I always just used Twitter as a way to see youtubers/streamers updates

It can be hard to bootstrap yourself up from zero followers. I'd recommend posting something just so that people have an idea of the kind of thing they can expect if they follow you from checking out your profile. But you probably won't get much engagement from your own posts at first, so it will probably be more fun to just reply to other accounts.

Bluesky has a feature where you can set up customized feeds to filter for any kind of content you want. The person who saw your post might have seen it in the "newskies" feed which just contains every first post that any account makes for example. So one way to get engagement can be to write posts that show up in a certain feed that people follow, like there exist some feeds that are based around certain topics that usually trigger based on your post containing certain keywords. Most people just use the following feed though, I think.

I’ve never used Twitter and have no interest in social media but I signed up for Bluesky because I have hated Twitter for 15 years. Also I appreciate that Bluesky has almost no data collection and no tracking. That’s cool.

Enshittification Stage 1 is ALWAYS sweet, but eventually ends
Yea, it's also open source, so that's cool
- Mostly, yes. The decentralized identity system is not.
  
  My fear with Bsky is even though it’s open source we’ll still just end up with one large VC funded company controlling the one big instance everyone uses and then enshittification begins.
For now

Does it still require SMS verification? Or was that lifted? That's where I stopped my out-of-interest signup last time.

/edit: It does not anymore. But my handle is taken now. :(

You can also now browse without an account on bluesky which is neat

Not NSFW content.