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.
Great another social media platform from the same fart huffing dumb asses that sold Twitter… it’s like people don’t learn lessons.
Americans be like “I like fascism I just don’t like THIS fascism”
I learned today that you’d have to be confined in a small room with approximately a year’s worth of farts before you risk asphyxiation.
Not my farts, that’d only take about a month
FYI jack isn’t in control of the site and in fact even deleted his account after the userbase mocked him hard enough, he’s all in on nostr now
Also it has federation in testing in a sandbox environment open to external developers, it will work similarly to Mastodon in that regard
“Mr Dorsey, ypur new platform is picking up, people are starting to use it”
“… I’m bored”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to have a social platform. I just want to make them” *Starts to leave*
“Mr. dorsey? Where are you going? Jack!?”
“Federation”, yeah…
it will work similarly to Mastodon in that regard
Nope, it works more similar to MTProto for Telegram.
Uhm no not at all, 3rd party servers already exists and people can talk across them, telegram has no relevance here
I love that I mentioned fart huffing and you automatically assumed I meant Jack.
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Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days
Edit: Source: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
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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’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.
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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.
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.
Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw
isn’t bluesky invite only?
Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.
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 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.
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.
“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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.
Hotmail was 2mb.
It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.
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 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.
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’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!
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.
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)
I’d love an invite if it’s still available (:
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…
I would love one if you have a spare.
I would love an invite if you have any left
I requested an invite a couple of months ago when I downloaded the app. Wish someone would invite me!
If I could have one, I’m waiting for months now. :(
It says that in the first sentence
lol they didn’t even bother reading the lemmy description. 😂
Yes, that’s part of what’s surprising about the number.
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.
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I would prefer not to use the letter in any form.
Fuck Ruskie Muskie
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
I didn’t bother and was gonna give it a walk around. Downloaded but can’t access without an invite.
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.
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?
It’s also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.
I firmly believe Elon is trying to run Twitter out of relevancy, or business entirely.
Lose $42 billion speed run challenge
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I didn’t know a coffee shop owner was so rich.
Who holds WR in EU%? You know, where endgame is getting wrecked by anti-monopoly agency.
I agree but I don’t understand why. What motivated him to sink 1/4th of his net worth into Twitter then kill it?
Knowing this nutter he’s probably doing it so people can’t talk about the crappy Tesla QC.
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The jet tracker
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Twitter is a huge place where leftists organize
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Probably wants to pull a reddit and push Trump
- I wouldn’t say that. It was filled with far-right and some people who like others to suffer and bring to suicide indie game developers.
It’s also used by fascists but there have been a lot of genuine leftist organizing going down deep in the cracks of that hellsite.
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The lawsuit he was destined to lose. Why do people here so often act like this was his masterplan all along? He fucked around and tried to back out, then Twitter sued him into buying the company. From what I can tell this is just Musk being Musk, reportedly he has surrounded himself with yes-men.
If that were true, the investors who paid him billions for the take over will want his head on a spike.
If you’d know who these investors are, you’d know running twitter to ground is their goal at this point as well
Ok, but why though? How do you make money when the stock value is falling?
The theory is they’re not trying to make money, but is trying to make it harder to use Twitter for organizing protests or share ideas that threaten their status quo.
Interesting. So are you saying there’s government money behind this?
Biggest investor is Saudi Arabia.
Ok, so this is just a way to prevent another Arab spring from happening. Seems like a smart move until you realize that people have lots of alternative platforms too. It’s a bit more fragmented, so organizing a demonstration on mastodon probably won’t get that big that fast.
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The saudis have more money than god. They could have just bought it and shuttered it if they wanted to. Your schlock makes no sense.
Plausible deniability, combined with opportunism. If they brought it, and shut it down, it would be painfully obvious. This could cause significant problems or pushback on them. Musk being an idiot provided an opportunity to them. They back musk, and he makes it non viable, however he wants. All the public outrage gets focused onto musk (who likes the attention).
I still can’t decide between the 2 options. Either musk is just THAT big of an idiot, or if it’s the result of some backroom deal. Both seem feasible.
I suspect that might have been their intent but they didn’t tell Musk. They knew him doing his best would be enough to tank it.
Yeah, his ego won’t allow him to fail with grace.
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The biggest funders are the Saudis, who hate Twitter for the way it allowed communication during The Arab Spring. 42 billion is nothing to them. They want Twitter to die, or be run the way the want it.
As Twitter is a big PR tool for Ukraine he’s again doing Putin a favour.
I think his Saudi funders are pleased.
Always good to see more people looking into platforms besides Twitter, plenty of great places out there
Until they sell that platform too and you have to grow your follower base somewhere else yet again.
Bluesky has federation in testing in a sandbox open to external developers, already interoperating with 3rd party implementations
has federation
Hahaha, no. It’s like MTProto in Telegram, but without being honest that it’s centralized.
Every single component have 3rd party implementations or an alternative which doesn’t depend on them (standard account DID lookups go through their servers but web DID is fully independent). The options he says nobody will create ALREADY EXISTS
The protocol literally doesn’t allow them to be gatekeepers.
The protocol literally doesn’t allow them to be gatekeepers.
Authentication is heavily tied to their servers
You can initialize your account with your own DID key using web DID instead of the current (technically placeholder DID) and you won’t be dependent on their servers for authentication. Especially in the federation sandbox that’s available for 3rd parties
From what you say I can approximate how it will go. First perpetual in-dev federation, then once they get enough people, they will say “not enough interest in federation” and stop development or pull the plug completely.
Who the fuck cares? Everyone should defederate from bluesky the moment they get it working. Fuck. These. Fucking. People.
It’s not even Fediverse either. It’s their own protocol. Can’t even really federate much either.
They have federation on in their sandbox network with 3rd party clients already working, but it’s not going to talk activitypub
Non-activitypub federated protocols? Who is even the 3rd party in this instance? Nostr?
Nostr is a wildly different protocol from atprotocol and activitypub.
Activitypub is very much like email (SMTP) over http, pushing messages between servers. Atprotocol is instead using a model of a repository with profile and posts per user on federated servers along with aggregation servers (CDN-ish) and a pull model for retrieval. Nostr is a P2P protocol with “gossip nodes”
That could change, like Threads. It’s important that we let it be known that the fediverse will not put up with billionaire dickholes.
Everyone should defederate from bluesky
They don’t use AP, so there is no federation to begin with.
For now.
They don’t intend do use open protocol. And it’s more centralized than you expect.
They do have an open protocol (atprotocol) but it’s not compatible with anything existing
Yeah and also Gmail should defederate Skype.
… Wait what’s that it’s different protocols? Oh well
I was interested in it but at the end of the day Dorsey got Twitter into its initially mediocre state, and he’s endorsed RFK Jr. as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter. So should I really expect it to be any better? I’ll keep an eye on it but my expectations aren’t terribly high.
and he’s endorsed RFK Jr.
Gross. Yeah Dorsey sucks generally.
as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
But I don’t hold this part against him. If some moron came along and offered to drastically overpay for my house, for example, I’d endorse the fuck out of that even if he’s a shitheel.
I signed up just to see the hype, and it’s the same boring Twitter, with less commitment. People just grabbing namespace.
Of course he’s endorsed Musk purchasing Twitter, he made billions off it
I wonder why people aren’t going for mastodon.
Was a open source platform run on donations entirely ever be a competition for something huge like Twitter? This is a first afaik.
I’d say Bitcoin is a bigger example.
yeah but like yesn’t. bitcoin isn’t a good example imo
How so? A decentralized open source platform with no owner which has a 500B market cap and 220 millions users.
I feel like that’s exactly what we are talking about. I understand the negative sentiment over crypto, but this is a fact.
Or maybe the difference is that it hasn’t stifled some competitor platform yet. I can agree with that because it’s not a parallel in that it’s competing with nothing.
The same reason people aren’t going for Lemmy.
Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user, those same users are entrenched and connected to everyone they already want to be connected to on the same platform. Until they are essentially forced to move, they’ll stay on Twitter. The people on Lemmy and Mastodon right now are a tiny but vocal minority compared to the massive userbases of the platforms they abandoned.
Mastadon (and the Fediverse in general, to some extent) has problems with discoverability and the average user finds federation confusing. People tend to either use microblogging to see what’s going on with people they’re interested in or to broadcast their activities to a large group of people, and Mastadon currently doesn’t fit that niche very well.
Pretty much this. It’s why I love it for my use case (microblogging journal that only I can see), but it’s definitely not for everyone else.
It’s why if your average influencer or news consumer wants a Twitter alternative, it’s likely Threads or perhaps BlueSky, not Mastodon.
I’m on there, but I use Twitter and mastodon as a follower, I don’t post. So until most of the 40ish people I follow move I’m stuck with Twitter if I want to see their posts. And I do.
People are so desperate for anything RESEMBLING twitter, that they’ll sign up for a trash service like BS.
Mastodon undoubtedly has more brand recognition at this point.
Honestly, before reading this comment I never noticed that BlueSky shortens to BS, lol
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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?
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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.
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).
CEO is a musk toesucker.
Strange to measure it against an invite only site, I would love to sign up but I haven’t been able to find invites. I think between Mastodon, Bluesky & Threads via ActivityPub (eventually) will get most of my communities back.
I love Mastodon & prefer it in many ways but there just aren’t enough people there. The tech & dev community is lively, everything else is essentially non-existent.
It’s a convenience article. They’re just reporting some number they have access to.
And why Threads instead of Mastodon if you belive it will use ActivityPub.
The tech & dev community is lively, everything else is essentially non-existent.
Broners are pretty active there. Biggest instance is equestria.social, some people use or run smaller instances, some use GP instances.
Threads has momentum and easy signups, it’s simple for people. I wouldn’t use it myself directly but I’m sure it would help expand the communities that are available via a Mastodon client.
Do you want one? I have a spare.
Sure, that would be amazing. Thank you!
I just realized I have no idea how to pm someone on here
Not sure via the mobile apps, and there are so many. From the regular Lemmy web interface, you just tap their name anywhere which takes you to their profile and then tap “Send Message” in the top right corner.
Found it!
what the fuck is Bluesky
And Threads?
Or Mastodon?
Yes, I also want to know how it is affecting the Mastodon user base.
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.
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-analytics.com/
Although it looks like this is 3 days behind.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount I discovered this after searching abit
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.
I refuse to touch anything related to Facebook. I’m shocked that people would use Threads or Instagram for that matter.
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.
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
