[HN Gopher] Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day
        
       Author : henrijn
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2024-11-16 21:58 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (bsky.jazco.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (bsky.jazco.dev)
        
       | countrymile wrote:
       | I've had an account for a few months now, it always felt very
       | dead, but something feels like it's shifted.
        
         | matsemann wrote:
         | My niche moved there summer of 2023, took some time to get
         | going, some cross posting for a while etc, but by the end of
         | the year it was almost exclusively on bsky.
         | 
         | But have noticed the uptick, gained like 400 followers the last
         | week. But it's a bit weird, as it's a Norwegian community, no
         | relation to American politics.
         | 
         | I guess it also can feel dead because it doesn't have a viral
         | algorithmic feed like Twitter. But for me that's not an issue,
         | ad even on Twitter I followed few enough people that I always
         | used the chronological view.
         | 
         | But I do like the custom feeds of bsky. Like a search/hashtag
         | on steroids, making it easy to discover others discussing the
         | same theme I'm there for.
        
         | pfisherman wrote:
         | Agreed. I was on twitter to discover, share, discuss articles
         | and talks in my field of research. A couple months ago I had
         | trouble finding good accounts and content; but now I am
         | starting to find some of the PIs I was following over on
         | twitter.
         | 
         | Biosci twitter -> BioSky?
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | Because there was a _certain_ geopolitical event about two
         | weeks ago that was a primary reason many still used Twitter /X
         | and now that said event is over (and whose outcome will likely
         | cause Twitter/X to further degrade) there is no reason to stay.
         | 
         | The exodus is not happening randomly or in a vacuum.
        
           | geoka9 wrote:
           | Or possibly, once the event was over, the users in question
           | had the idea that Twitter/X affected the outcome in the way
           | they didn't like and they decided to boycott Twitter/X?
        
           | ideashower wrote:
           | This plus the fact that starting Nov 15 tweets become by
           | default training material for their language models:
           | https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/x-is-
           | using-y...
        
       | James_K wrote:
       | One million accounts per day, and all of them making posts about
       | their X.
        
       | ideashower wrote:
       | It's definitely a whole different platform now, compared to when
       | the first exodus happened. I'm loving it!
       | 
       | The "starter pack" feature is great. There's also this website
       | where you can browse created starter packs for groups/interests
       | you care about: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
        
       | smrtinsert wrote:
       | What's preventing everyone from putting their faith in another
       | broadcast medium just to have it sold to Elon again? It's hard to
       | trust social media these days. They have 0 incentive to be "good"
       | from a variety of perspectives not just political.
        
         | johnny22 wrote:
         | because it's not centralized and you can self host it.
        
           | asddubs wrote:
           | if everyone is in practice using the same instance, they can
           | just un-decentralize it at any moment they want, though
        
         | vidarh wrote:
         | I don't like Bluesky because I feel it's a whole lot of
         | pointless Not Invented Here vs. improving on ActivityPub, but
         | it is still far more resistant to that than X/Twitter because
         | people _can_ migrate more easily.
        
       | jsheard wrote:
       | On the topic of Bluesky stats, I just learned that blocks are
       | effectively public via the API, so there's a hall of shame
       | ranking the most blocked users on the site:
       | https://vqv.app/blocks.html
        
         | James_K wrote:
         | A lot of Brazilians there. I guess it makes sense that they are
         | a large portion of the user-base after Twitter got banned.
        
         | aucisson_masque wrote:
         | > a hall of shame
         | 
         | Usually that's the opposite that happen with these kind of
         | people. They are going to look forward on being the at the top
         | of the leaderboard, like a child doing stupid things only to
         | get noticed by its parents.
        
       | arp242 wrote:
       | What happened on Oct 17? I can't really find anything that would
       | cause such a dramatic uptick on that day specifically.
        
         | JSDevOps wrote:
         | Got to be a podcast or something popular that Donald Trump
         | appeared on
        
         | CryZe wrote:
         | That was the time we learned about the changes to the block
         | feature.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | That, and the TOS update which requires users to give X
           | blanket permission to use their posts for AI training
           | (previously you could opt-out). Not that AI companies
           | actually care if they have permission right now, but if legal
           | precedent doesn't go their way then coercing users into
           | "giving permission" to use their data will be the next step.
        
         | ks2048 wrote:
         | A bigger jump seemed to be Aug 28 - Sept 7 (daily likers 200k
         | => 1M+). I wonder why. (also some days are missing there, so
         | maybe something changed in the data collection).
        
           | davidcbc wrote:
           | Brazil banned twitter
        
         | bazzargh wrote:
         | that was the day they officially announced the change to how
         | blocking worked, notifying all users (the owner had mused about
         | it a month earlier)
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | No surprise as to why Bluesky is taking off, despite calling it
       | years ago. [0] Now it has 18M+ users with 9M MAUs and 3.3M DAUs
       | [1] after removing the invite system.
       | 
       | The familiarity is easily transferable for a migration from
       | Twitter / X. If you know how to use Twitter / X then you know how
       | to use 90% of Bluesky.
       | 
       | No need to 'choose an instance' or some admin shutting a server
       | down due to 'other reasons' unlike with Mastodon or an arbitrary
       | blackbox algorithm that limits / hides your posts found in
       | Threads.
       | 
       | Bluesky has learned from the mistakes of others to have a default
       | first approach, you choose your own feed + algorithm and a search
       | functionality that (works) can find accounts across the platform.
       | 
       | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750185
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
        
       | aenopix wrote:
       | heavily censored
        
         | insane_dreamer wrote:
         | evidence?
        
         | citizenkeen wrote:
         | People blocking jerks isn't censorship. Do you have a source
         | that there's any kind of censorship going on stronger than
         | other social media networks?
        
       | cpeseethe91 wrote:
       | The sewage waters of the world
        
       | NAHWheatCracker wrote:
       | As someone who never used Twitter, I made a Bluesy account and it
       | was okay. I learned that I have no idea how to engage with that
       | style of social media.
       | 
       | One thing that put me off is how so much of what I saw was just
       | talking about Bluesky vs Twitter. I hope they can move past that.
        
         | charles_f wrote:
         | Lol, I got curious about nostr, and it's the same thing, with
         | an extra layer of "crypto currency will save the world"
        
         | matsemann wrote:
         | I joined twitter like 3 years ago, so also quite late to this
         | type of game. Compared to forums, hn, reddit etc it's quite
         | difficult to get your voice heard in the beginning. Anything
         | you post is just shown to no one when you have no followers.
         | Takes some time interacting with others and hope they follow or
         | repost to get some traction.
        
         | skywhopper wrote:
         | People talk about what's on their minds. Most of the users just
         | moved in the past week or two so that's the hot topic. But
         | it'll change soon enough.
        
       | kome wrote:
       | finding the same ppl on bluesky needs work, and it's not a job
       | i'm going to do. if twitter decays, good; i will get rid of my
       | last social media app.
        
         | ksenzee wrote:
         | Not all that much work:
         | https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge...
        
         | tcfhgj wrote:
         | before elon banned the api, there were tools to automate this
        
       | ersiees wrote:
       | What is the alternative to AI twitter? Is there some incumbent
       | where it moves?
        
       | epistasis wrote:
       | Back in the news net days, there used to be a parable about a
       | Berkeley hot tub. The owner would give out the code to people,
       | and it would be a good party with a rotating cast of characters
       | for a while, until eventually a few people ruined the party. Then
       | the code would change, and a different crew would start coming
       | through.
       | 
       | Pre-Elon, it seemed that Twitter was doing a pretty good run of
       | keeping a single social network running for a long time. As has
       | Facebook.
       | 
       | But for lots of dedicated communities, the new owner has such
       | direct contempt for them and has focused on ruining the party.
       | 
       | Bluesky will work for now. Already science Twitter is having a
       | huge renaissance now that links are no longer suppressed and
       | discussion has lower noise:
       | 
       | https://substack.com/home/post/p-151688877
        
         | aorloff wrote:
         | https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/09/28/berkeley-hot-tub-guy...
        
       | medo-bear wrote:
       | What happened to Threads ?
        
       | ksenzee wrote:
       | The infrastructure has been rock-solid. I've never seen a service
       | grow this fast without any noticeable outages. The architecture
       | and execution are obviously informed by serious experience at
       | Twitter, but it's also clear that management is giving them
       | everything they need to do the job right.
        
         | benjaminwootton wrote:
         | The performance is really good. Searches and general
         | navigation.
        
       | hebleb wrote:
       | I'm a 100% lurker and it's such a nicer experience before any
       | enshitification. It probably won't last forever, but no ads or
       | spam, and simply seeing a feed of accounts I follow is all I
       | want.
        
       | stavros wrote:
       | Does anyone know any good makers I can follow on there? I'm
       | mostly interested in making stuff, less in monetizing stuff, so I
       | don't want to follow so much entrepreneurs (ie people who like
       | making stuff to make money) as makers (ie people who like making
       | stuff for its own sake). Any good lists?
       | 
       | If anyone wants to follow me on there, I'm @stavros.io.
        
       | rr808 wrote:
       | Is it better than Mastodon? I signed up for that then gave up
       | quickly.
        
       | qudat wrote:
       | Gratz to the blue sky team, it's very hard getting a social media
       | app to gain traction.
       | 
       | However, after messing around with twitter and mastodon, I really
       | do not get the appeal. All the incentives are not to have
       | meaningful conversation, rather it is all about engagement.
       | 
       | It's way too much noise and not for me.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-11-16 23:00 UTC)