Huh. Don’t know. I’ve only watched fedidb. I’d bet part of the difference is whether the users are on mastodon or not. Fedidb separates by platform and I used the mastodon specific number (which is maybe too much of underestimate).
@maegul have there been any active user numbers on bsky? Mastodon's historical retention is < 15% so there are < 1M MAU today (not counting the broadly-defederaed "bad fedi" instances). Bluesky started invite-only which makes it easier to have a higher retention rate and it's newer so it wouldn't surprise me if it's bigger than Mastodon already or at least fairly close.
To me it's not so much a reason to dump on #Mastodon or the #fediverse, as an indication that the opportunity that Mastodon didn't take advantage of is still there. Bluesky hasn't addressed their moderation problems and so it's going to be very bumpy when they open it up, and also they haven't really started to federate and there are likely to be bumps there as well. They've got some good things as well, there's a lot the fediverse can learn from BlackSky, and it's not an either-or thing. https://privacy.thenexus.today/work-together-with-metas-fediverses-and-bluesky/ talks about some ways the fediverse and the Bluesky/ATProto world can work together.
I think active user monitoring fell off a bit AFAIU. What I have seen is that, somewhat like masto, MAUs are going down ... with my take being that we passed a "local peak alternative twitter" around Oct '23, 3 months after Threads' launch, which prob took a lot of oxygen out of growth numbers.
They have concerns about bsky but think it's the best choice for journalism at the moment (though, apparently, Threads is making that a hard sell ATM, which I didn't know and is so many sighs).
Yes @aendra is great, i assume you saw https://www.aendra.com/posts/my-top-bluesky-feature-requests-for-2024 -- the point about how "some part of me feels strongly that the "federate by default, public by default" nature of the Fediverse is a huge driver of these issues is" is completely on target. And functionality aside, I agree that Mastodon today acts like they don't want journalists around. Of course some of it's also that the more positive aspects of not wanting transphobic journalists around -- which has been an issue for newsie.social and journa.host -- and the question is how to keep that withough the exclusionary attitudes to other journalists.
@maegul@thenexusofprivacy I'm tracking users who post at least once daily and weekly, which I think is a good proxy - users who give likes is about ~40% higher as seen on https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats, and probably a bit more that just lurk. Overall hard to estimate, but maybe around 500K-ish active?
Also, I think Masto's active numbers were higher - I read something like 1.8M in October?
An MAU on masto, AFAIU is someone who logs in once on a month. So I’d bet bsky MAUs would be pretty decent as a ratio of total users, which also wouldn’t be surprising at its early stage.
It's interesting for me to see how many really liked and would like to keep the small+gated bsky of 2023 ... a reminder I think that that can be a nice way to do social media too.
@maegul@thenexusofprivacy Yeah, I think a lot of people liked that state… I'm curious how the social dynamics will change, and even what will be technically possible once we have people from multiple PDSes.
I'm generally optimistic, I'm looking forward to more media people and public figures coming there, generally to it becoming "more serious". And as someone running some bsky-related tools I'm a bit worried about how much the traffic on the network will increase and how suddenly 😅
Thanks @mackuba, great data. Yes, Mastodon's MAU are logins within the last month so it's apples-to-oranges, still very interesting to see.
I'm curious what will happen when they open it up. Back in the day Google+ was amazing with a few million people in the beta, and then it wasn't so amazing, but Bluesky has better moderation functionality and a lot more diversity that G+ did when they opened it up so we shall see.
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