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Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

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Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#131

Post by icantevenhold »

testbjjl wrote: post #115
icantevenhold wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird why not? I can’t read the article due to some nightmarish anti Adblock software they use wtf

So you didn’t read the article, made an assumption about its content, question someone who did, then blame Adblock for your confusion, instead of just following the conversation?

No I was confused that they wouldn’t count the browser users when there is no good reason to when they try to eval their user base? MAU commonly includes web users as well.

I blame TechCrunch for creating a website that I can’t read but yea fair criticism I didn’t read the article.

I didn’t question GP i asked if they knew why web users aren’t counted.

Do they explain in the article why they would only count mobile users as MAU?

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#132

Post by mexicocitinluez »

jryle70 wrote: post #54
brooke2k wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

calling elon musk "a Republican" is such a wild understatement

[flagged]

lol So stating a fact means you're more likely to be on Bluesky? Sign me up.

As long as it's not run by a guy who is so pathetic he lies about the video games he plays.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#133

Post by Hugsbox »

vachina wrote: post #118
Hugsbox wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot be serious. On the rare occasion that I do open it up for whatever reason, I'm immediately stunned by the cesspit that greets me. I refuse to believe that's not like 90% bots.

[flagged]

It would be the "being bots" that makes them bots. I know there's some nutcases out there, but not enough of them to fill a twitter-sized insane asylum, and I'm talking about accounts that make statements at both ends of the political spectrum. You spend about 2 minutes on there and nearly every post or comment you read leaves you thinking "there's absolutely no way a real, living, breathing person wrote this", unless you yourself are an absolute lunatic or very gullible. It's downright baffling.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#134

Post by jamilton »

eterm wrote: post #66
delecti wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was this? Other than posts from official the Bluesky account (bsky.app) my feed is roughly 0% about Bluesky itself. There was more discussion about Bluesky itself early on, when the contrast with Twitter was more topical. And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.

Perhaps it's the crowd I've followed and I've fallen down a niche, but I keep getting pushed threads such as this: https://bsky.app/profile/palle.eurosky.social/post/3msirglff... And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me. It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there'…

I prefer to just stay in the Following feed unless I'm specifically looking for new people to follow. It feels like an easier way to get see the kind of posts I want to see.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#135

Post by inigyou »

hamburglar wrote: post #99

I notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?

> you don't need to use a mobile app

Since they're apparently tracking mobile app MAUs as a KPI, expect this to change.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#136

Post by inigyou »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.

We already have others running infrastructure as well so if bsky goes away the platform can survive

Over 99.99% of users (actual number, not hyperbole) are using bluesky's infrastructure. If it goes away, the platform dies.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#137

Post by inigyou »

graceful6800 wrote: post #88
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been a fan of the "Product driven by desire for profits" line because it simplifies too much into too little imo. The reason people like scale is that it brings a diverse set of interests. For better or for worse, most Mastodon servers I've seen have a pretty similar set of interests. They're really the same constellation of interests I've seen heavily represented on internet forums since the late '90s. Th…

That also is intentional. You join a server that suits your interests and follow people from other servers to broaden your feed. The goal is to form interlinked communities

Notably, Mastodon servers are genuinely independent servers. The federated experience is third-class. The same-server experience is first-class. It's not trying and hasn't succeeded to build one giant interlinked network the way BGP has for IP addresses.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#138

Post by inigyou »

tptacek wrote: post #20
cdrnsf wrote: post #18

We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.

Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.

It's not one platform. It's a set of independent platforms that sometimes federate. The M/AP federation experience is a third-class experience. Cool kids don't federate, they're already on the server with the people they talk to.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#139

Post by inigyou »

Lerc wrote: post #31
ChicagoDave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents. I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.

Why would bots be limited to twitter? Wouldn't Bluesky be just as susceptiblle. I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me. I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 5…

It's not about susceptibility, it's about actuality. When you open your home page, do you see an army of bots or an army of non-bots? That's what matters.

There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets.

Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.

Re: Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

#140

Post by TacticalCoder »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #47
ecshafer wrote: post #30

Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.

Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree t…

[flagged]
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