Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X

3 more million needed for Mastodon, Threads and Blue Sky to beat Twitter.

How many does Threads have?
- So, you're asking what the thread count is?
- Threads has 275 million.

BlueSky is really just Twitter pretending to be Mastodon, but that's a minor issue compared to the problems associated with platforms like "X" and TikTok today.

What matters most right now is killing off Twitter and breaking up the dominance of any one platform on social media. I really don't care where people go as long as they get the fuck off of Twitter and TikTok. Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion. Divide and conquer.

Bluesky doesn’t even have to be Mastodon. It just has to Twitter before it went bad.

This shows how bad threads is.

Threads is honestly terrible. There are these asinine little widgets on Instagram that show you threads that people have posted and don't show you the full one so you click see more and it brings you to the app store. But no one really uses it much, so you see a lot of things being posted with no interaction at all

I sincerely doubt 1 million regular people a day are leaving Twitter.

We’re watching bot accounts be created at scale in real time.

I think "leave" is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.
I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, "The creatives have moved to Bluesky."
- I've heard of people having similar experiences on Mastodon as well. Seems like these smaller communities of early adopters tend to simply be more active and pleasant to interact with.
- I don't think "creatives" are more active than anyone else. For the number of users, the threadiverse has a higher ratio of activity I think and it's generally more positive here than places like reddit. Maybe it's a similar thing. The demographic that are likely to move, are just making similar content and that makes it look more active.
You underestimate the news cycle hitting regular folk who so far didn't know alternatives existed to twitter.
- Yeah once the mainstream media started picking up Reddit stories, that’s when Reddit started going to shit.

inb4 bluesky gets bought by Musk (or bezos) for a fantistillion dollars. And everyone doing a surprised pikachu face.

That is the only likely future ahead. BS is growing so fast that there's no way they can sustain this growth even if they add ads. The only path forward is selling out. I think Microsoft might be interested in finally owning a popular social media site.
- Won't happen. Not necessarily the them not buying it part, but it staying popular at all. No site/program is too big for Microsoft to torpedo. Skype used to be the verb for voice calls before they got their hands on it.

The "pseudo" federated platform. If it flops they will just tell everyone "federation s*cks" but BlueSky isnt federated at all

Please don’t swear on the internet.
- "Sucks" isn't even a swearword! Are we jst going to strt censoring normal wrds now?
- My day is no longer fine
Guarantee 99% of bluesky users have no idea what federation is
- Nor would they care if they knew about it.
- Most internet users have no idea what it is.
Then federate it.
You are probably right here in how news agencies and other competing sites would/might phrase it if BlueSky fails.
Though what bugs me and logically does not make sense (to me) is saying federation is what caused or could cause a site or service to fail.
Its like saying my new shinny website failed because of the Internet, the Internet must then be the problem.
- Yeah i have the same feeling about it, but its like that buzzword AI. If AI company fails its always the "AI" but no one understood what AI did in that project.

And they're doing this...after the election too.

Brain lapses, people.

Yeah I don't know why it took people so fucking long to realize that being on Twitter does nothing other than help the oligarchs, but here we are...

Bluesky have two things over Mastodon:

-Money for a big marketing campaign, and reaching famous people.

-A better first comer UX.

First one is hard to solve. But UX in Mastodon should be solved. Local and federated feeds are useless, specially on the "default" .social instance. They need to find a way for new users to be able to see a relevant feed of toots and to have an easier time finding people they'd like to interact with.

It is a solvable problem, I hope someday it could be done.

I like the idea of the local feed, especially for smaller, less generalized instances, but the default should definitely be federated and the wording could also be changed if only because the word "federated" would probably be confusing to non-technical people. Replacing it with something like "All" might be a better idea

Now you have everyone right of center on one Platform and everyone left of center on the other. Great ...

Exactly. They're abusive assoles. Fuck them. We're outa there.
Why do people of different political leanings need to be in the same entertainmart platform?
- They're social platforms, not entertainment, and it's to prevent echo chambers

I was never a big tweeter, but I find Bluesky to be friendlier in general, and I'm digging it :)

I think a lot of the future of social media is going to be determined by ease of use/beginner-friendliness.
The issue (and strength) with Lemmy is there's multiple instances. You're not gonna be able to explain it to non-technical people, even as an experienced programmer myself I sometimes find myself getting confused by Lemmy. People don't want to learn, they just want to use something that works.
Then again, KBin only had the one instance pretty much I think, and yet that died out anyway. So I think part of it is people just want to go where everyone else is, and that did end up being Lemmy and not KBin (although the maintainer of KBin also refused outside contributions which helped seal its fate lol)
If Bluesky has the one instance, and you literally just go to bsky.app and sign up, that's going to be a lot easier than trying to sell people on Mastodon or Lemmy when they Google those. Then again, I just googled Mastodon and it took me right to Mastodon.social so maybe I am mistaken.