Bluesky user activity has declined by 23% over the past three months

Bluesky user activity has declined by 23% over the past three months(bluefacts.app)

21 points by uwemaurer 355 days ago | 21 comments

fsflover 355 days ago |

Perhaps users realized it's not much different from the early Twitter, with likely a similar future: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

starkparker 355 days ago |

I'd love to know the breakdown in declines between bot/engagement accounts and organic posting, though that's likely impossible even with the labeling system. I couldn't tell if there's even a perceptual decline in the former because I've mass-blocked them through blocklists and labelers.

archagon 354 days ago |

Subjectively, I have only noticed a steady increase in posting activity on Bluesky and Mastodon over the last few months, to the point where I now have a hard time keeping up with my feed.

zero-ground-445 355 days ago |

I can see it. I feel like it not taking off. Sad.

oldpersonintx2 355 days ago |

joining bsky was just a protest vote, not a legit desire to engage

threads felt the same, its also dead

TimorousBestie 355 days ago |

This is the reality of a platform that is hostile to corporations (even if it is hostile for good reasons). As far as I could tell, the company running Bluesky has limited ideas about monetization. In part, because they’re well aware their user base is hostile to X-style monetization (which, sure, probably made money, but at what cost?)

Hopefully some other ATProto implementor will come along with a better idea.

It is interesting to me that e.g. Adobe left Bluesky after relatively minor pushback, but they stay on X despite the much larger problems associated with that platform.

palata 355 days ago | |

But doesn't it mean that it's better for users? Why don't user go there? Do they like being abused by corporations?

Genuinely interested. I don't get why people would use X and not Bluesky.

TimorousBestie 355 days ago | | |

I mostly interact with scholars on Bluesky, and my feeling is that the ones refusing to leave X don’t understand that a lot of the “engagement” (follows, views, likes) they see there is illusory (bots, spam accounts, misreporting of statistics, etc.)

“I had 10k followers on X but only 2k on Bluesky” is the kind of refrain I hear a lot. Even if they get more “organic” engagement in replies from human beings.

Also, there are no “private” accounts or “private” DMs on Bluesky. (That this only exists on X in name only does not phase them.)

dragonwriter 354 days ago | | |

Social media has extremely high network externalities. People who are information consumers want to go where the people who are active posters are, and people who are active posters want to go where the audience is.

The actual qualities of the product are almost irrelevant if you have the current user base; it takes very a lot to get even a sizable minority of people to actively use social media that doesn't have that kind of established dominance in the face of social media that does, and it has to be sustained.

That's why most new successful social media sites (even though over time they may converge on feature sets) become successful by dominating some particular new media or interaction style not supported well on existing social media—it effectively lets them operate as if there was no dominant competitor, as an add-on rather than replacement for existing dominant social media. But Bluesky doesn't have that.

incomingpain 355 days ago |

Bluesky has the same problem as Mastodon. Both of which fully understand their problem; neither of which are willing to change.

It's ultimately their choice to make. The current choice means they can never take off and they automatically let X win.

Who am I to tell them what to do?

It must be about 2 years ago when they published their community guideline rules and it's trivial to see how they have no chance of success.

archagon 354 days ago | |

Doubt it. In my Bluesky and Mastodon feeds, there are plenty of intelligent and interesting people who will never return to Twitter under any circumstance. So I don't know if Twitter will ultimately "win" in terms of overall numbers, but the signal I care about simply won't be there. I suspect it will turn into a zombie social network like Facebook: full of trolls, bots, and annoying people trying to go viral.

fsflover 355 days ago | |

> community guideline rules

There's no such thing in Mastodon. Each server can choose their own rules.

incomingpain 355 days ago | | |

>There's no such thing in Mastodon. Each server can choose their own rules.

Gab is a mastodon fork that is isolated from mastodon. What community guidelines did Gab violate?

TimorousBestie 355 days ago | |

Hmm? What’s so objectionable in the community guideline rules?