I wonder how many independent bluesky servers there are.
i'm not sure about how many PDSes there are exactly, but according to stats there are around 500 active users not on the BlueSky's flagship PDS
There are currently zero bluesky servers that aren't fully dependent on bsky.app.
This kind of thinking frustrates me, creating a good social media site/service should not be about inifinite growth or numbers games, it should be about creating a good and sustainable community, something so far I have only seen some of fedi try to do.
Commercial social media only cares about numbers, not sustainability nor creating a decent community.
Having a fast way of getting announcements to people is important. Everyone from the WHO to official government announcements to musicians with a new album to activists announce(d) things on Twitter. For that purpose the first and foremost thing is maximizing the reach of the announcement.
Now there are a myriad of better platforms for this (irc or a mastodon instance owned by the org) but quite frankly they will never have the same populations as bluesky or Twitter (in the short term) because they are a as you put it a "good" social media that isn't just about infinite growth.
Be glad that the billionaire actively and openly trying to censor the world is losing out to the billionaore that will leave it alone and sell out again in decade or two. And on the side mastodon picks up the more traditional social media role among those in the know and maybe one day sustainable growth will make it the biggest fish and can take over from the replacement for the replacement of bluesky as the primary announcements channel.
22 million users. 2700 million likes. 122 likes per user?
That engagement ratio seems a little off?
It could be bots and such, but if you take into account that probably every comment or post (I dont exactly know how the plaform works) gets a self-like, it's easy for this number to be high. The other person that replied to you, has around 110total likes just from comments/posts and it's been around less than a month.
So, if the platform has self-likes, it could be possible🤔
Bib bop, I'm a human and like to do human things like breathe the air.
I dunno, over the course what, six months? A year? And since there's been an influx of Twitter users they're probably frantically liking every old follow/er they see to recreate their network.
Also, on Bluesky likes influence the algorithm more than it would on the fediverse, so who can blame them for gauging the ecosystem?
Do you think that's low or high?
I read Chris Webber's essay and I kinda agree. Bluesky is really just another twitter.
That being said I think we are entering into an era of diversification, not perhaps how we would like (through federation) but rather, through people understanding finally that the platform itself is making a choice in what kind of content it serves. We used to have this idea that the platform was just a "neutral third party" like a phone company. But in fact, it's a publisher with its own editorial line. It pushes that line through algorithms and what voices it wants to amplify or suppress.
As people understand this more, they are going to be much more critical of not just "the media" but also "the platform" and why it chose to show that media to its audience.
There is a blog post from 2023, but worth reading in case you don't know it:
I keep hearing Electric Light Orchestra on my inner record player whenever I see Bluesky is mentioned.
If only running an appview didn't require VC level money... I mean it's still way better than twitter, twitter would have never allowed fed.brid.gy or alternative clients and whatnot but it would still be nice if there was more than one service on the protocol
