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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

#151

Post by inigyou »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #140
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Is anyone on X defending pedophilia or FGM?

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

#152

Post by numpad0 »

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…

Twitter is having bots and spams actively injected rather than them simply existing as a phenomenon. There are not many possible explanation for that other than that its owner is likely wanting them.

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

#155

Post by afavour »

pessimizer wrote: post #150

Bluesky's active user base has never not been shrinking, no matter what they were focusing on. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideolog…

> It's entire life is due to lib slactivism

I'd disagree with that, I'd say its entire life is due to the shittifying of Twitter. People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like and (after trying and not being satisfied with Mastodon) it's the next best thing. The problem is that a social network of this kind relies on having a large enough population to feel "live" and Bluesky has never got there.

There have been glimmers of hope... during the NBA finals and the World Cup Bluesky felt like a genuine destination for live sports. But it might be too little too late.

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

#156

Post by syrrim »

dragonwriter wrote: post #29
nxm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.

The only way in which BlueSky is preferentially catering to the left is by existing as an alternative to X and specifically providing tighter control of what is in your feed; and this is only “catering to the Left” because of the groups towards which X either has weakened or stopped enforcing its policies against harassment towards. (In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self rei…

Twitter has right wing and center/apolitical people on it, bluesky just has left wing people. They "cater" to them by not clamping down on those people harrassing anyone who joins who doesn't agree with their politics. A smart move, because if they did then the leftists would leave too and they'd have nobody. But the result is they can't even get the centrist/apolitical people to move.

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

#157

Post by davidw »

omoikane wrote: post #15

Maybe Bluesky is not quite the Twitter rival it set out to be, but it's got a better shot than Mastodon, according to the user count graphs here: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://mastodon-analytics.com/ Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels…

Blue Sky has 'enough' for me. I don't care if it's the biggest platform. It's got local elected officials, it's got bike racing content and people, it's got software people, and by using it I'm not supporting the white nationalist owner of Twitter, so I'm happy with it. I occasionally post a bit to Threads when I need some more 'reach'.

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

#158

Post by amiga386 »

Hugsbox wrote: post #133
vachina wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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", unles…

That's really on you. There are (according to Wikidata) 259,000+ verified notable humans, who have Wikipedia articles about them, who have their own Twitter handles.

Here are some of them: https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Fitem%20%3FtwitterHan...

That doesn't mean they post regularly, but it's more than enough real humans to follow (so that they can retweet bot crap at you)

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

#159

Post by Bluescreenbuddy »

eterm wrote: post #40

I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting. I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things. It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.

>but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself,

Fix your feeds then. I don't have this issue

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

#160

Post by Bluescreenbuddy »

conradfr wrote: post #97
gniv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of politics, yes. It's a bit like the worst of reddit. Nobody reads the article, everybody gets outraged in the same cliché way. If you try to provide nuance you get derided or blocked. (Blocking seems to be held in high esteem, which I think is also part of the problem.)

Building a social network with people in love with shared blocking lists is not a great recipe.

Actually it's great.
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