Well, it’s now challenging PieFed and Lemmy soon
Being 10% the size of your largest rival in 2 years when they’re practically a monopoly in the space is actually fairly impressive.
Wang said that Bluesky would move away from the “public square” style of feed of X or Threads, and will instead be “useful” as a discovery mechanism.
That just means having an /r/all for the platform that utilises their own algorithm with weighted content based on who they believe is going to be better for generating growth.
Their biggest problem with user retention is probably that new users don’t follow people who put out enough interesting content to make people stick to the platform. They follow a few people they know or like but they’re not generating enough content.
This also contrasts with something like tiktok, which is pretty much all fyp (for you page) based on their hidden algorithms assessing what you like based on how long you view the content etc. Fyp is probably a stronger example of what Bluesky could be doing to fill the gap but their algo needs to be good and I don’t think any other tech company online has ever had something as good as tiktok’s algos. They are scary good once they learn you.
Having an optional FYP that isn’t central to the platform sounds pretty great. I’d like a way to reset the algorithm though.
It’ll be central imo, FYP will be default landing page and then a feed of solely the content you follow will be a separate page, just like tiktok. They’ll mix in your followed content into your FYP though in order to reduce the likelihood of you using the other feed.
Being 10% the size of your largest rival in 2 years when they’re practically a monopoly in the space is actually fairly impressive.
Under most circumstances I would totally agree, but the amount of people that saw Xitter turn into a Nazi site but went back to it anyway is so distressing to me.
Im not surprised. Bsky was a pretty great place for artists to post their work and a fairly trans-friendly site. Nowadays its pretty impossible feeling to build an audience. The most “popular” posts are mostly liberal news reactors sharing AI-generated anti-trump memes. Majority of LGBT users I know abandoned the site when the moderation team indignantly refused to ban Jesse Singal. Most artists I know have either gone back to Twitter/IG or given up on promoting their work online wholesale
I personally moved here from Bsky and now Hexbear is the only social media site I actively use
Pretty much. There was potential early on but it’s totally fucked now. I only still use it keep up with some friends and accounts like Wario64, while also constantly subtly pushing folks to move to mastodon instead.
A lot of Instagram users sorta got automatically roped into threads. I have no idea how I have one but I do, I think it’s from posting on insta
Pretty sure they autocreated a threads account from every active instagram account when they launched threads.
Find it kinda hard to believe that they even have more users than bsky.
They don’t. Probably 1 click signups from insta accounts and now they just report all active insta accounts (with a linked threads account) as active threads accounts whether or not those accounts are actually engaging with threads.
400 mau on threads seems reasonable, considering Instagram has 3 billion MAU.
400 mau
sure
400 million mau not so much
Why is 400 million not reasonable? Also bearing in mind that they have nearly zero bot controls in place.
have you looked on threads? It’s pretty dead. Most of the main page is 16 hour old posts with maybe 5 interactions, a few posts by large accounts with more.
It depends on how they count users. Personally I see posts with thousands of likes posted within the last 24hrs, some with none, some with hundreds after a few days. Seems fairly reasonable overall, but again, they could be counting users who just browse and don’t interact at all in the active users. For a meta product, 400 million is quite low compared to the billions on Facebook and Instagram.
What this site needs is obnoxiously online young men to yell at anyone who doesn’t conform to the gamer ideal
So epic
What they mean by this is using Reddits style of businesses.
deleted by creator
It was created by techbros for techbros and very early on taken over by the exact audience they didn’t want (i.e. lots of queer folks and progressive/borderline-leftist people). The selling point was the stronger moderation features: blocklists, detaching quote posts, etc. The userbase went to shit when the site opened up, no longer required invites, and liberals flooded it in November 2024, but keeping a following list small and subscribing to a shit ton of blocklists does make the site usable and still better than twitter’s nazi bar, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.
It’s technically decentralized but ATProto is dogshit and can hardly be considered a decentralized protocol. If the main site goes down, pretty much every independent host goes with it. The devs are also heavily on-board the AI train and proudly shout about how the whole site is practically vibecoded at this point while also cooling off their phones in the pool (something one of their most senior devs actually did).
Also the site barely fucking works lately lmao. The past two weeks it’s been borderline unusable because nothing will even load for most of the day. Incredible stuff.
Also worth noting that the devs and former CEO explicitly allowed actual high profile nazis like jesse singal to stick around, while they constantly ban Palestinians seeking aid and trans folks standing up for themselves. They’re omega pissed that they didn’t cultivate their crypto techbro audience they wanted from the beginning.
tldr it’s a mess. It’s better than twitter, but it’s still a giant fucking mess. why the internet seemed to collectively decide this was a better choice than say Mastodon is beyond me.
The block lists work both ways though. Yeah, it’s cool you can hit the “block the Nazis” button and it just does it. But say anything vaguely socialist, supportive of animal rights, etc and you’re getting put on the “commie vegan freak” list by some shithead that is going to cut you off from a significant portion of the site because people subscribe to those things without any real thought.
Yeah absolutely. I have no problem if people who subscribe to those sorts of lists block me out, I don’t use social media for outreach to strangers so the less liberals who see my posts the better, but it’s absolutely something to consider. And there have been numerous malicious blocklists where the creator will call it a nazi list and it’s actually a bunch of leftist trans folks or whatever. It’s not a feature that works without strong per-instance moderation, which bsky absolutely doesn’t have.
It might be as something simple as that Bluesky sounds better than Mastodon for a name (not judging either site I barely use them)
“Toots” and “Skeets” both sound like fetish shit that cause people to scatter when you whip out your phone. That can’t help.
Yeah not trying to argue but Mastodon to me sounds like a vehicle, a tank or outdoor wear. Not a social media site.
I like ATProto better than activitypub, but yeah Bsky is dog shit.
Unrelated to your other replies:
Lantian “Jay” Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, whose name (蓝天) literally translates to “Blue Sky” in English, was not involved with the website until after she joined and is purely co-incidental.
My understanding is that bluesky has full support for federation on a technical level. I would agree with describing it as fake federated, because probably over 90% of users/content are on the flagship instance. If the flagship instance defederates from yours you’ve probably lost most of the reasons you had for joining bluesky and will want to switch. If they change their mind entirely about federation, even the users you followed that weren’t on the flagship themselves will probably be switching over, so you’ve essentially lost your entire community unless you switch yourself. When one instance has most of the userbase, the whole network outside it can be killed if they decide to switch off federation.
This is actually why the join-lemmy site is coded to only display instances with under (iirc) 30% of the user share. Right now that’s .world that won’t show until their usershare drops under.
As far as why they would do that, I assume just as another way to market it? Probably hoping to syphon off some mastodon users or selfhosters at its inception to get the userbase growing.
Quadruple reddit. Wait, no, that’s Lesswrong. Idk then
::cries in Jedi:: YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BRING BALANCE TO THE SOCIAL MEDIAS, NOT JOIN THEM
