[HN Gopher] Bluesky Reaches 10M Accounts
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Bluesky Reaches 10M Accounts
Author : Kye
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-09-15 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsky.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsky.app)
| ColinWright wrote:
| The Mastodon User Count account suggests there are 15M accounts
| on Mastodon:
|
| https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11314334534088311...
| Mastodon Users @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social
| 15,438,893 accounts +209 in the last hour +2,542
| in the last day +20,162 in the last week Sep
| 15, 2024, 21:00
|
| Of _course_ there are differences ... I would be pleased to hear
| first hand descriptions of them
|
| _EDIT: I hereby withdraw everything I said about BSky. Based on
| the replies, clearly I 'm completely wrong. I apologise for all
| inaccuracies._
| Kye wrote:
| This is nonsense. Bluesky is not a big shouting match. If you
| don't like the default algorithms you can pick your own,
| including chronological.
|
| If this is sincerely your actual, real experience with Bluesky
| then you use it in a very different way from all the people who
| are happy with it.
| BryantD wrote:
| To be completely fair, feed algorithms can be somewhat
| opaque. On the other hand, most of the feeds I follow are
| just picking up on keywords/emojis or include all posts from
| a specific list of people. So it depends to some degree on
| your choices.
| Kye wrote:
| That's true. I do wish the Discover algorithm were open,
| but I understand that can open it up to abuse. So far it
| mostly just shows me nice things. There was no point with
| Twitter's algorithmic feed when I could say that.
|
| I can't speak to any secret motivations but it seems like
| the folks running it care about making a nice place for
| people to hang out. We've seen how a desire to not be evil
| can clash with a desire to make money, but I remain
| optimistic.
| timeon wrote:
| One thing I do not understand about @mastodonusercount stats
| is: while total number of accounts significantly increased in
| last year or two, 'thousand toots per hour' is still
| oscillating in the same range.
| Kye wrote:
| Mastodon seems to have a retention problem, but still has a
| healthy daily new user count. I noticed this back when it hit
| close to 2m active then slid down to 600k. If they can figure
| out how to fix retention then it might start growing
| meaningfully again.
|
| https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon
| BadHumans wrote:
| > Bluesky is one big shouting match with opaque algorithms
| partly deciding what you will see, whereas Mastodon-the-
| Platform is a loose alliance of multiple communities, where
| what you say will only be seen by people in your community
|
| Bsky feed is chronological with optional algorithmic feeds you
| can choose from so this doesn't sound true. Mastodon is also
| chronological with trending post on the homepage. I imagine the
| internals of both platforms are more similar than you might
| imagine.
| riffic wrote:
| Mastodon is not just Mastodon alone. The network consists of
| something more fundamental: ActivityPub
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
| BryantD wrote:
| If you don't subscribe to any feeds, Bluesky is also a place
| where what you say will only be seen by people who follow you
| and people who follow those who repost your posts. Whether or
| not either of them is a shouting match depends a lot on your
| choice of who to follow.
|
| This is not to say there aren't significant differences, many
| generated by the federation choices Mastodon (and Bluesky) have
| made, as you also noted.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Rather than misinformed dick-measuring between the two, we
| should be glad that the next generation of social media traffic
| is distributed among many services and not centralized on one
| that would inevitably devolve into Twitter-like patterns.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Wow, so low. That explains why its still a ghost own compared to
| xitter.
| Diti wrote:
| For context (if you're wondering why that post is written in both
| English and Brazilian Portuguese), Twitter/X is currently blocked
| in Brazil [1], which prompted users to massively flock to
| Bluesky's main frontend, bsky.app.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazil
| skybrian wrote:
| It would be nice to also know seven-day actives on BlueSky, but I
| don't know where to look or where to ask.
| Kye wrote:
| 3.2 million
|
| https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/bluesky-day.html
| verdverm wrote:
| More stats sites
|
| https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
|
| https://clearsky.app/
| skybrian wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Edit: how do you find out about such things?
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" Edit: how do you find out about such things?"_
|
| Being there when the deep magics are written. These kinds
| of tools come up if you follow the developers and people
| interested in decentralized social media.
| openrisk wrote:
| At some point some "serious" accounts need to take these emerging
| new decentralized social media seriously and setup shop there.
|
| You cant claim any sort of moral integrity when you engage with
| your audience on platforms that treat them as product.
| verdverm wrote:
| A number of people have already increased their social platform
| presence by adding Threads and Bluesky. The moral integrity
| comes when they leave their large following as the platform
| diverges from their values
| jacoblambda wrote:
| So the migration is starting.
|
| You have quite a few journalists and news feeds that post on
| bluesky. Phil Lewis and Aaron Rupar (two fairly notable US
| liberal journalists that have substantial followings on
| twitter) are on bluesky and now that video has started rolling
| out they have become more active again.
|
| And not a "serious" set of accounts by any means but the
| consensus from the vtuber community (which is to be honest one
| of the massive communities on twitter) is that they'd start
| moving over to bluesky once video support and some degree of
| moderation were in place. I suspect a lot of the other fairly
| cohesive niches on twitter will start looking at bluesky now
| for the same reasons.
| Kye wrote:
| Significant portions of Brazil's government and media are on
| there as well, including the president and one of the top
| news programs in the country. The latter caused a huge spike
| of growth all on its own by putting its handle in broadcasts.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/lula.com.br
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/jnoficial.bsky.social
|
| And the most important: Duolingo.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/duolingobrasil.com.br
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| How many bots?
| nunobrito wrote:
| Advertisement disclaimer.
|
| Bluesky is a VC-funded corporate network that expects return on
| investment while saying it is open. Up until the present date
| that same company made it difficult for anyone to run their own
| server, only permitting to self-host their own data rather than
| the promoted decentralized open data:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/22/24080334/bluesky-self-hos...
|
| It also restricts anyone from adding their algorithms or even
| create new clients to access the data. It is a _defacto_ walled
| garden that somehow gets promoted on mainstream media. The same
| media that largely ignored open platforms, or when mentioning
| them has adopted a negative tone. That media has forgot that the
| same brazilian person they called names is now living in a
| country under effective control with walled gardens:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-fiatjaf-nostr-do...
|
| The same ignored Nostr counts today with +700 volunteer-based
| servers that are decentralized and permit anyone, anywhere, to
| publish their own texts: https://nostr.watch/relays/find
|
| HN, it is time to make a stand if you want to keep the internet
| free.
| Kye wrote:
| Anyone can make a feed (algorithm). There are multiple
| independent projects that can access and put stuff on PDSes.
| There are lots of clients. They just added OAuth to make it
| easier for them.
|
| https://docs.bsky.app/showcase
|
| I have no idea where you got your information but you should
| treat that source as unreliable.
| mrinfinitiesx wrote:
| Agreed. Make a stand. Open and free internet is the last
| bastion. Look at everything. We're not the god damned product.
| We're not advertisement data. I'm not a fucking ROI. We're
| human beings, and we enjoy the internet, hacker culture. We're
| visionaries. We tinker. We build. We share.
|
| Seeing what the internet grew to from the 90s to now, is
| ...well you see it.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > Up until the present date that same company made it difficult
| for anyone to run their own server, only permitting to self-
| host their own data rather than the promoted decentralized open
| data
|
| > It also restricts anyone from adding their algorithms or even
| create new clients to access the data. It is a _defacto_ walled
| garden that somehow gets promoted on mainstream media
|
| This is not remotely close to true and the verge article you
| picked was from the initial rollout of federation which was
| only 2 weeks after they got rid of invite codes and the service
| became public.
|
| ----------
|
| Feed generators (aka the algorithm) are open. You can create
| your own feeds and their app literally has a UX for adding new
| feeds.
|
| Labelling and Moderation services are also federated.
|
| And data storage like you mentioned.
|
| And the "firehose" (the event relays).
|
| And even the app-view system/API services.
|
| Oh and of course the Bluesky app's web, android, and iOS
| implementations are open sourced as well.
|
| There are certainly some things they still control but that's
| because this project is still actively being developed to basic
| feature completeness. An example of that is the primary DID
| format used for defining accounts. The standard DNS record
| based DID format is federated by it's nature but ATProto's in
| house DID format is still limited to their instance until they
| can get it to a production state where they feel comfortable
| opening it up to federation (like they have every other aspect
| of their codebase so far).
|
| I'm actually not sure how they could be more open about their
| push for federation. They want to relegate themselves to the
| position of developer and infrastructure maintainer as quickly
| as possible and their work has all been towards that effort.
| cma wrote:
| They do need to disclose their corporate charter.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Is that really important in your opinion?
|
| I can't remember the last time I saw a corporate charter
| that was more than vague corporate speak sounding grandiose
| and impactful while saying absolutely nothing.
| ryan29 wrote:
| I tried skimming the docs, but couldn't find how domain
| verification works on Nostr. Does a verified domain work as
| your handle or only as a verified domain?
|
| That's my favorite feature in Bluesky. I don't need to worry
| about a handle since I can just use my domain.
| mepian wrote:
| >is a VC-funded corporate network that expects return on
| investment while saying it is open >Nostr
|
| Do you mean the same Nostr that is backed by Jack Dorsey, the
| Twitter billionaire?
| strangattractor wrote:
| > "HN, it is time to make a stand if you want to keep the
| internet free."
|
| That ship sailed long ago:(
| datavirtue wrote:
| Before it could load I hit back. Honest feedback.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Maybe I should use this instead of Threads. I had an account
| there, 'deepsleepcountsheep' and then it randomly got
| banned/turned off and it keeps asking me to prove my identify. I
| submitted my state drivers license but apparently they can't use
| that? Insane honestly, not really sure what triggered it, maybe
| the icloud private relay?
|
| Anyways, I think I'll try either this or mastodon.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Mastodon is the way, and it federates with Threads.
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(page generated 2024-09-15 23:00 UTC)