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Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only (mashable.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[-] [email protected] 163 points 9 months ago

Great another social media platform from the same fart huffing dumb asses that sold Twitter... it's like people don't learn lessons.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] rivermonster 145 points 9 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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[-] [email protected] 74 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days

Edit: Source: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount

[+] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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[-] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.

And? Servers are inter-operable.

[-] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 108 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

This is a problem. Bluesky is privately-owned and will do same shit.

Here are some explainations. And more.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago

It's also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.

[-] [email protected] 104 points 9 months ago

isn’t bluesky invite only?

[-] [email protected] 79 points 9 months ago

Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.

[-] [email protected] 73 points 9 months ago

Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.

[-] [email protected] 57 points 9 months ago

In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that's been way more successful than G+

[-] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

It says that in the first sentence

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[-] [email protected] 72 points 9 months ago

I wonder why people aren’t going for mastodon.

[-] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

Yeah there really needs to be a rethink of how the Fediverse works.

I don't want to have to subscribe to 8 different "Games" subs each with under 3000 users.

It really should be like "topics" more than "sublemmys" (or whatever) where every post on the Fediverse tagged "games" will appear on your feed when you subscribe to the topic.

The topics still get moderated by the local instance topic moderators and instances can defederate from troubled instances, but discoverability would improve exponentially.

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

They are as well!

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[-] [email protected] 61 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 53 points 9 months ago

Excuse me, signups on an INVITE ONLY platform?

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[-] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago

what the fuck is Bluesky

[-] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago

It’s Jack Dorsey’s “Twitter but federated this time”, except there is only 1 instance, run by Jack…. But don’t worry, “Trust me bro” it will totally be federated/open.

Maybe it will be but until it is it’s just as bad as Twitter.

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[-] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago

I firmly believe Elon is trying to run Twitter out of relevancy, or business entirely.

[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

Lose $42 billion speed run challenge

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[-] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago

Always good to see more people looking into platforms besides Twitter, plenty of great places out there

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[-] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

Honestly, before reading this comment I never noticed that BlueSky shortens to BS, lol

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[-] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

I wouldn't hold my breath, 42k out of 528M is nothing

[-] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago

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

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[-] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

~~Who is the target audience for BlueSky?~~ BlueSky's tech isn't as open or developed as the alternatives though, is it?

Edit:
Not sure why I asked that first question, answer's obvious, so it was more out of frustration I think. Sort of in a similar way towards people moving to Threads or any other corporate social media again after getting screwed before.

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

God I hope he gets gaslit into actually making Twitter a subscription. It would be so funny

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

Switch to Mastodon. It's a great alternative.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

Bluesky, the "decentralized" X-alternative social media platform

"The" alternative platform?? Shots fired.

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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023

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