Bluesky now has 30 million users.
The platform crossed the milestone last night, and it happened about a month and a half after the 25 million mark. Bluesky still has a long way to go to pass Threads, though; Meta’s platform has more than 100 million daily active users. [Media: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3lgu4lg6j2k2v]
What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.
Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it's probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.
The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.
What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?
another trash platform its just matter of a time, use mastodon and fediverse to don't migrate again in few years
And how many users does Mastodon have?
This is the saddest, most insular cope I've read all day.
Does it have anything to do with crypto and decentralisation? I heard it did but it doesn't seem like it does at all. Disappointing
Federation is too confusing for the average bear. the success of bsky is the best thing for getting people off twitter
Try hosting your own instance and sorting through the content of 30m people for the one post you want. lol
Whenever I see how they keep getting brought up, I'm always reminded of that Dilbert ep about how people just fall for blue logos that are easy on the eyes. They don't even have to know what it is... just the fact that the stupid logo is blue is enough. lol
Can I get the icon in cornflower blue? https://youtu.be/4NomQYQK1bE
Mastodon has around 1 million active users³ Bluesky has around 3.5 million active users²
Bluesky doesn't have a decent way to see active user count, but it is likely higher than 3 million
Mastodon retains 10%, Bluesky retains 10% also, but I can't confirm it
Edit: Using unique likes, it shows about 2 million active users on each day¹
Source:
I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.
Pass
While I understand that, I'm in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.
Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It's the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.
But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I'm not going to fight it. I'm having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I've written the media address of environments I'm familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Funny, someone shared an article in another post about all corporate money going to Delaware, https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/06/delaware-is-everywhere-how-a-little-known-tax-haven-made-the-rules-for-corporate-america/
Unfortunately that's standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There's zero benefit to them.
I don't think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).
In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there's a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it's just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.
That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can't, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.
Arbitration of what? It's a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?
You're not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it's not going to be public-facing. It's their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks... right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media... Except you've been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that's shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.
Let's try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. "Too expensive, nobody will know if there's a bug anyway." So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw... if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and... Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.
Think more evil. Don't stick with the "I have nothing to lose" because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.
You have nothing to hide. Just sign away all your rights.
During signup, they make it sound like it's a federated service. It is not. Dumped it when it was explained to me.
Off topic, but I pointing this out reminded me of visiting some ancap circles to see the crazy stuff they discuss. At one point there was a question about how externalities would be handled in their system of private courts and such. When ever I do read some terms and conditions there is almost always something in regard to arbitration. Predictably they were not happy about someone pointing that out and explaining that it is for the benefit of corporations not the customers.
Nice. Glad to see people leaving xitter en mass.
I feel like we're going to have a similar issue a couple of years or decades down the line with Bluesky. People would be better off on the Fediverse instead.
And that's fine. What the exodus to Bluesky is doing is making it easier for people to stomach switching to similar platforms, so if Bluesky also went to shit, the inertia is much lower for people to abandon it.
No, this time will be different, I swear!
Another corporate social media platform, what could go wrong?
It is less than ideal.
I only hope that it gets people used to the idea that you can leave a platform and the sky wont fall down. Sooner or later these guys will try a federated service and learn that protocols > platforms (in this case activitypub).
I can't wait for them to bring in ex CIA/IDF types to "clamp down on disinformation".
What do you think the closed beta was for? It was so they can get in and get on the moderator roster
Love an app that defaults me to people I actually follow and doesn't bombard me with endless reams of ads or engagement bait.
We'll see how long that lasts. But for now, its a blast from the past to be on a social media app I don't hate.
Sorry to hear that, but at least some of them are not on Xitter.
I never trust meta statistics anymore because you know they're filling out their "numbers" with bots to try and keep their stock prices up.
In terms of real users I bet bluesky has already surpassed them.
I find it odd that people follow Jack Dorsey into another sewer in troves. They seem to like the previous Twitter experiment, while I find it repugnant.
The lesson today is that I don't get the social media phenomenon. My bad. I hope they have a ton of fun.
He's already gone. But, regardless, why sign up for yet another corporate social media site when every single one of them becomes enshittified after a few years. Are they just planning to abandon Bluesky eventually too? Or just hoping that this time it's different?
You say that as if any Mastodon instance was guaranteed to last several years.
Jack Dorsey has no involvement in Bluesky. He doesnt even have a Bluesky account.
Jack Dorsey is not part of Bluesky, maybe you don't get things because you don't pay attention.
I didn't like Twitter as a social platform, but I did use it a lot for news on current events, such as how is the traffic on my route home, and why am I stuck in traffic, and how many miles ahead of me is the fucking accident?
Handy for communication during some kind of emergency that floods the phone network, but that's pretty niche. Anyway, I interact a little on Bluesky but mostly it's just a time killer like TikTok or whatever. Twitter was super easy to quit between the Musk take over and moving away from DC.
30 million users and still nobody likes my posts
Tried it last night for a hockey game. I still think I'm not using it correctly but people were nice.
There’s no right or wrong way. For it to be fun for an event like that you need to follow lots of people in that space. Like journalist, reporters, beat writers and analysts. However if you don’t want that content in your feed full time you could try searching one of the teams hashtags and use the latest tab to follow along. You can also take all those suggested follows and make a list to pin to your BlueSky front page without following them and just goto that feed during games.
Oh interesting, thanks! I figured out the hashtaga bit but a lot of fun popped up without the hashtaga etc.
I suppose I'll just keep muddling along and figure something that works for me while trying to be a net positive influence!
Man, people love Left wing Gab.
The need to give everything a political stance these days is maddening and IMO very divisive.
When Bluesky was first launched in February 2023, it was an invite-only beta that required an invite code to register. Several prominent influencers and celebrities, including Breadtuber Twitch streamers were given referral codes to share with their audience. As a result, these codes were kept within these leftist spheres. So the user base is mainly Left wing. All I'm doing is calling spade a spade.
Sounds disgusting
I agree with you, the number/the rise of users on such platforms makes me feel sick. There literally is a built, proven, & running alternative. The difference is what, "the onboarding process" which instance to choose if you wanna post & vote?
You mean the alternative where a random person decides what people you’re allowed to interact with?
Always reminds me that George Carlin was right