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

Post by nailer » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:25 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #155

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…

Post by hocuspocus » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

amiga386 wrote: post #158

Hugsbox wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Post by nailer » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #148

TMWNN wrote: post #24

Reddit is dominated by the left, but there are other voice audible. Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account. There are very, v…

What does this comment even mean? Substitute "left" for any other adjective, like "purple" or "embobulated" and it's equally meaningless: "There are very, very few non-embobulated people on Bluesky."

Post by skybrian » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #22

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…

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.

Post by 1attice » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

MarkusQ wrote: post #16

edoceo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a different timeline?

Yeah, but it's behind a cosmic paywall.