Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only

Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.

Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform's entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.

The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website "Bluesky Stats." Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.

It's impossible to know whether Musk's comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.

qwertyWarlord,

I wouldn’t hold my breath, 42k out of 528M is nothing

aceshigh,
@aceshigh@lemmy.world avatar

I wonder why people aren’t going for mastodon.

Fedizen,

different features and scalability

theanon,

When someone links me the backend code of mastodan I’ll join. Till then it’s just another Facebook. I’ll stick with my own website tiblur

PlutoParty,

Have you at all attempted to look? It’s open source.

theanon,

This is why it’s not being downloaded. It has terrible reviews it’s a 3.5 out of 5. You don’t think it but people care about that. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0768eafb-989d-431d-8089-7ac8ba3d6a3f.png

I have never tried Mastadon. Normally if a company is good it has great marketing as well as great direction, even if it’s a nonprofit. For instance, federation can never work for growth because it’s like operating a franchise. The owner of Mastadon doesn’t give his franchisees any cut. If he did they would bend over for him to grow their instance. It’s actually a new concept that is pretty smart but not executed well. Think I will copy it for Tiblur.com. Right now Mastodon is just a non profit version of McDonalds which all but ensures instance owners will lose their shirt if something bad happens on their instance and they are sued. Corporate structure is the only way. Just don’t build a shitty company. Also, why isn’t mastodon homie asking for peoples contacts, that’s how any app grows. You can do what FaceBook and Instagram do but just dont be a shit.

PlutoParty,

What is why it is not being “downloaded”? It seems you don’t actually understand how it works. You realize we are talking on a federated network right now, yeah? You must be trolling.

theanon,

Im on a computer not a phone. People like apps not browsers.

theanon,

Oh boy, I’m looking through the code for Mastodon right now. Already located one zero day after reading 300 lines of code. Who wrote this app…

PlutoParty,

Point it out and share it with everyone. That’s what FOSS is all about. I bet you won’t.

theanon,

What i don’t get about mastodon is that if the owner wants to pull the plug he can take away the app any time. What kind of tomfoolery is this. He can also legally sue instances he doesn’t like. how can you say mastodon is decentralized.

PlutoParty,

I’m not going to entertain your buffoonery.

Little1Lost,

but it is under the: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0Permissions of this strongest copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available.

So he cant revoke anyone of using the software he contributes

Draconic_NEO,
@Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

It seems like you’re deliberately misrepresenting, but I’ll explain anyway because I know that some people might be confused.

The Mastodon app is a client on your phone which accesses servers in the network.

The network consists of multiple servers that are interconnected to each other. Content from one server is automatically cross-hosted to other servers when it is discovered on those other servers. That’s how Federation works. I know it’s probably an oversimplification of how activitypub works, but it’s generally good enough for most people, and the important part is really that content is present and visible on other servers.

When you sign up to a server your account is stored on that server, the posts that you make are stored on that server, as well as automatically cross hosted to other servers which have people following you.

If the owner of a server pulls the plug for whatever reason the content on that server will no longer be directly accessible, if your account is there you will lose your account. The copies on other servers will remain as they have been copied. The rest of the network will continue operating without that server and the accounts that were hosted on it.

About asking whether or not an instance owner can sue instances they don’t like, that sounds like absolute nonsense and I’m not even going to bother trying to understand whatever point you’re trying to make with this.

seitanic,

Of course they won’t. They’re shilling their own product which is a competitor to Mastodon.

theanon,

It’s on the android store I’m looking at the reviews right now.

Schadrach,

Since you appear to be talking about a Mastodon mobile app and not the Mastodon network a fair bit of negative reviews are about many of the mobile apps blocking access to Gab. Gab switched to a Mastodon back end back in 2019 or so and several of the apps started to blacklist using that instance at the app level as a consequence. Usually negative reviews about that will refer to “the largest Mastodon instance”, which Gab actually was by sheer numbers.

There was even an issue request to hardcode blacklisting Gab into the backend, though they were basically told no in no uncertain terms.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Whut? github.com/mastodon/mastodon

mint_tamas,

github.com/mastodon/mastodon

Fumbles,

Congratulations of joining mastodon today. 😆

theanon,

I’ll stick with Tiblur but the UI on this is decent.

pomodoro_longbreak, (edited )
@pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works avatar

Not only is it open, but you can check it out yourself and install right from source if you really want to get under the hood.

I’ve seen folks out there running a 1-person masto instance, just so they can partake in the fedi from their own fully sovereign platform. Bit extreme for me, but cool that it’s an option. Definitely not just another FB in other words

EDIT: Oh dang there’s a one-click app on DO even.

Bongles,

I’m on there, but I use Twitter and mastodon as a follower, I don’t post. So until most of the 40ish people I follow move I’m stuck with Twitter if I want to see their posts. And I do.

Albatross2724,

depending on how popular the user is on Twitter, you may be able to follow them on Mastodon via bird.makeup. I use it to follow things like larger content creators, NHL teams, stuff like that.

Bongles,

Oh interesting. I was unaware.

paris,

They are as well!

Asudox,
@Asudox@lemmy.world avatar

Was a open source platform run on donations entirely ever be a competition for something huge like Twitter? This is a first afaik.

locuester,

I’d say Bitcoin is a bigger example.

Asudox,
@Asudox@lemmy.world avatar

yeah but like yesn’t. bitcoin isn’t a good example imo

locuester, (edited )

How so? A decentralized open source platform with no owner which has a 500B market cap and 220 millions users.

I feel like that’s exactly what we are talking about. I understand the negative sentiment over crypto, but this is a fact.

Or maybe the difference is that it hasn’t stifled some competitor platform yet. I can agree with that because it’s not a parallel in that it’s competing with nothing.

jasory,

Do people either make money or think they’ll make money simply by using the Fediverse? One can certainly advertise via guerrilla marketing on a Fediverse platform but it’s far more lucrative to advertise on mainstream social media.

Rambi,

Are you saying brands don’t want to come to the fediverse to market their products? I mean if that’s true that seems like a good thing, and even if it wasn’t I’m sure they would once Lemmy/Mastadon are big enough

jasory,

No I’m pointing out why the comparison to Bitcoin is inaccurate. It’s like saying that your open-source software project will work because the Linux kernel worked. The sole point of similarity has little relevance.

The Fediverse isn’t asset speculation, Bitcoin is.

joenforcer,

The same reason people aren’t going for Lemmy.

Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user, those same users are entrenched and connected to everyone they already want to be connected to on the same platform. Until they are essentially forced to move, they’ll stay on Twitter. The people on Lemmy and Mastodon right now are a tiny but vocal minority compared to the massive userbases of the platforms they abandoned.

seitanic,

Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user

How did the average user ever figure out email?

Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow,

Yeah there really needs to be a rethink of how the Fediverse works.

I don’t want to have to subscribe to 8 different “Games” subs each with under 3000 users.

It really should be like “topics” more than “sublemmys” (or whatever) where every post on the Fediverse tagged “games” will appear on your feed when you subscribe to the topic.

The topics still get moderated by the local instance topic moderators and instances can defederate from troubled instances, but discoverability would improve exponentially.

Rambi,

Maybe how it could work is sublemmies could agree to link up and share posts so for example the posts from one games sub would appear in the other games sub and vice versa.

It seems the limitation with the topics idea is who would decide what the topics are? Would there just be a list of like 20 topics baked into Lemmy and people that create sublemmies would tag their sub with a topic? I think the only limitation with that is there would be so many niche subs that don’t fit cleanly into one topic, or will be drowned out by the big subs in there maybe. Maybe it could work though if anybody could create new topics, then there could be a Fallout for example with the Fallout subs being in that rather than having to be in the games topic and being drowned out

Krauerking,

Yeah it sorta needs to be back to hashtags to tag content so that it can all be in a community despite being in different instances and subs. It’s really disjointed and currently the fediverse feels like we went back to AOL chat rooms where it’s a lot of people waiting in their own room for someone to come in and talk to them.

It doesn’t work and it doesn’t really inspire conversation anymore.

Rambi,

Yeah it is like that unfortunately. I mean the larger subs are fine but the niche ones just aren’t working on Lemmy atm and some way of addressing the sub splintering would help a lot. And yeah hashtags would probably be a solid way of addressing it.

TheSaneWriter,
@TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.com avatar

Mastadon (and the Fediverse in general, to some extent) has problems with discoverability and the average user finds federation confusing. People tend to either use microblogging to see what’s going on with people they’re interested in or to broadcast their activities to a large group of people, and Mastadon currently doesn’t fit that niche very well.

decadentrebel,
@decadentrebel@lemmy.world avatar

Pretty much this. It’s why I love it for my use case (microblogging journal that only I can see), but it’s definitely not for everyone else.

It’s why if your average influencer or news consumer wants a Twitter alternative, it’s likely Threads or perhaps BlueSky, not Mastodon.

Zoness,

I want to like it but they refuse to open up the platform still after Twitter keeps handing them opportunity after opportunity and I’m afraid their chances to succeed are going to wane.

Natanael,

They’re focusing on scaling and moderation tools that can handle federation better (especially spam management), they don’t think that’s ready yet. But you can federation it in their sandbox environment

Venomnik0,

I’m so glad people are calling Bluesky out for the trash service it is. I just mastodon outlasts this crap and we get more people on there than bluesky

13617,

What’s wrong with Blue sky?

Omega_Haxors,

CEO is a musk toesucker.

HelloHotel,
@HelloHotel@lemmy.world avatar

And of cource i misread that as “CEO is Mr. mark toesucker”

tourist,
@tourist@lemmy.world avatar

If you run “Mark Zuckerberg” through google translate a few dozen times I’m sure it’ll spit that out at some point

IHaveTwoCows,

It’s still a centralized. Single owner platform. Srop making assholes into millionaires

joenforcer,

Yeah, but they work until someone decides to fuck it up. Federation isn’t the holy grail you think it is.

Admins (often a very very small group if not a single person managing an instance) still make unilateral decisions about federation and content or the very existence of that instance, and if your home instance suddenly defederates or goes poof, too bad, time to start over on a different instance with a new account with the exact same risks or maintain multiple accounts.

If this sounds familiar, it’s awfully similar to what reddit did with their API by cutting off access points to content which is why most of us are here. Same shit, different shade of brown.

IHaveTwoCows,

Still not the same

KingThrillgore,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

Having been active on mastodon.lol and watching it get shuttered because the admin didn’t have teeth in the game shows how dangerously fragile the fediverse can be. My engagement with Mastodon as a whole has been less since mastodon.lol shut down. You can move accounts but you can’t move posts and 301s only work until the instance is gone.

FarceMultiplier,
@FarceMultiplier@lemmy.ca avatar

I have to agree. Federation only goes a little way on the path to a proper decentralized social media system. Ideally, defederation should not be possible, and rather, community subscription should be the norm without concern over what instance it exists on.

I’m not saying it should become Usenet, but it should be more similar to Usenet than it is now.

13617,

Oh, but mastodon doesn’t have a good algorithm like Twitter it is hard to switch

TopRamenBinLaden,

The whole point of Mastodon not having an algorithm to show you things is to put the user in control of what kind of content they want to see.

Why do you need an algorithm to tell you what you are interested in? You go on Mastodon and subscribe to what you want to.

topinambour_rex,
@topinambour_rex@lemmy.world avatar

Mastodon has algorythms. Otherwise it couldn’t display the posts in the right orders, by example.

TopRamenBinLaden,

You’re right. That word has always been kind of dumbly used as a replacement for something like, “feed manipulation controlled by corporate interests”. Every computer application uses algorithms in some way.

13617,

Because it’s hard to find things, the normal person is used to an algorithm

odelik,

I remeber Facebook before algorithms took over.

You friended and followed things, and then you’d see content from those things only in either chronological order or by recent activity. People loved it and as “the algorithm” took over people complained that they were no longer being served the content they wanted and expected and were also seeing content they did not want to see from stuff they had never followed or shared interest in.

Fuck the magical algorithm that’s tailored to serve me divisive content because that is what drives the most engagement. Or serves me content to sway my political and moral opinions to the benefit of some wannabe oligarch or government entity (looking at you TikTok/CCP).

WorldWideLem,

I was interested in it but at the end of the day Dorsey got Twitter into its initially mediocre state, and he’s endorsed RFK Jr. as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter. So should I really expect it to be any better? I’ll keep an eye on it but my expectations aren’t terribly high.

OsrsNeedsF2P,

Of course he’s endorsed Musk purchasing Twitter, he made billions off it

Cyberflunk,

I signed up just to see the hype, and it’s the same boring Twitter, with less commitment. People just grabbing namespace.

Evilcoleslaw,

and he’s endorsed RFK Jr.

Gross. Yeah Dorsey sucks generally.

as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

But I don’t hold this part against him. If some moron came along and offered to drastically overpay for my house, for example, I’d endorse the fuck out of that even if he’s a shitheel.

Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow,

“I have never met Elon, and by all accounts he is terrible. However, I have seen the yacht that he paid for, and it is terrific.”

Meowoem,

Did you not read the text messages between them? Jack was being a real fan boy

dangblingus,

People are so desperate for anything RESEMBLING twitter, that they’ll sign up for a trash service like BS.

Mastodon undoubtedly has more brand recognition at this point.

wokehobbit,

Apparently not. Outside of you Lemmy assholes jerking each other off nobody even knows what the fuck Mastedon, Lemmy, or any of this is. Everyone still uses Reddit you cunts.

IHaveTwoCows,

Go home, Spez, you’re drunk

wokehobbit,

Go home overused memer, you’re a cunt.

IHaveTwoCows,

Lol

DeadNinja,
@DeadNinja@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly, before reading this comment I never noticed that BlueSky shortens to BS, lol

xc2215x,

Not too surprising.

kunalkhatri,

Anything in form of competition is good imho.

doabliptnk,

Vbe. T. Cv. C n vbubvcui… Vnx, a, a t. a. Chào. X x ih. X, nhưng, it’s x u. But v v b

uis, (edited )
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

This is a problem. Bluesky is privately-owned and will do same shit.

Here are some explainations. And more.

realharo,

It’s also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.

nxfsi,

But Twitter has been dead ever since threads took over…

UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN,

Twitter has been dead for over a year. Well before threads. It started with the shadowbans and the tweaking of the algorithms to push media down our throats when all we wanted was cat photos and to talk about music.

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

Twitter was dead long before another billionaire bought it, you just didn’t listen to gamers.

Ejh3k,

Twitter died when they decided to tweak your timeline so it wasn’t chronological. I deleted my account back in 2013 because of that shit.

reagansrottencorpse,

Why would anyone listen to gamers ?

Illuminostro, (edited )

I ignore the opinion of anyone who has an anime chick as their avatar.

Omega_Haxors,

It’s because a lot of them use anime PFPs to dog whistle their pedophilia, kind of like how neo-nazis use squidward PFPs.

reagansrottencorpse,

The Squidward thing is new to me, whats the deal?

Omega_Haxors,

It’s a reference to an old nazi meme which I will not go into detail, but it involves squidward edited to have dark skin.

mojo,

How the hell do you even sign up

UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN,

I think you have to be invited to join BS (fnar!).

mojo,

Yeah that’s why I’m wondering how the heck are they signing up

Gestrid,

Users who already have accounts on Bluesky get access codes they can give out to others over time. You don’t even need to open the app to earn access codes. You just need an account.

Basically, as the devs let more and more people in, the platform will experience exponential growth. If the devs let in one person, that one person can let in 5 more in just 2 months time, and those 5 can let in 5 more each, and so on.

mojo,

Why the hell Bluesky is still invite only is beyond me. They killed their hype during the most important time, during multiple Twitter exoduses. People wanted to swap to it but couldn’t. They were so desperate that Threads got 100m users really quick, just because people so badly wanted a Twitter alternative. Invite only doesn’t even provide any benefit.

airportline,
@airportline@lemmy.ml avatar

Bluesky doesn’t apparently have all the user safety tools that it needs before opening the flood gates.

mojo,

Wow we have a lot in common, neither does Lemmy lol

Omega_Haxors,

Artificial scarcity.

Draconic_NEO,
@Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

That’s the only real reasons anybody goes the invite-only route, (that and extremely lazy moderation) it’s mainly to create FOMO for popularity. That’s also why they aren’t publicly visible and require you to login to view posts.

Omega_Haxors,

Glad cracker musk is losing money over this, I just wish people wouldn’t just jump into the next boiling pot because the current one got too hot.

rivermonster,

Mastodon or bust!

t0lo,

Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw

UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN,

Hard to convince people. The twittersphere has fractured into about 4 different places, and masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.

And? Servers are inter-operable.

IMALlama,

Until your home instance defederates from another instance. Sure, you can always make another account, but your average user wants a lower friction experience.

I’m reasonably active in the fediverse, but I recognize that the more explaining it takes to the average user the less likely they’re going to want to join in.

The old old top gear cool wall tried to hit on this concept. You could have a very technically excellent car classified as uncool because if you had to explain why it was cool to a normie you had already lost them.

It will be hard for the fediverse to get over this hump, which is probably why you see so many Linux users here and so few say woodworkers or other (somewhat) more niche communities.

IHaveTwoCows,

That the normie can’t just sign up and figure it out by using it is the problem. We have too many stupid and lazy people

Eldritch,

Most average people would never notice defederation unless you told them. It’s pretty frictionless and drama free.

The niche communities are always the last to come. It’s why they’re niche. That techie people are the first is nothing damming. It’s always been that way for every service.

kambusha,

That’s a good point. Branding is done for a reason. When I buy a car, I don’t need to know which companies made each and every component, it’s enough for me to know that “Audi” made it.

I guess if someone made an easy entry-point for users to sign up, that became the defacto way to start with Lemmy, then it would have a lower barrier to entry. Maybe it asks them some likes/dislikes, and then it would route them to the most appropriate instance to sign up.

Theharpyeagle,

Honestly I think Mastodon needs a third party app that makes it feel more like Twitter, similar to how reddit apps are switching to lemmy. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there were any third party Twitter apps that had the name recognition of the reddit ones.

geosoco,

THere were a few but they got bought (eg. tweetdeck).

There are also 3rd party apps for mastodon that a lot of people like, and they try. But for many people, mimicking the parts of Twitter they value is difficult to do without proper backend support for supporting algorithms, and even then the way activitypub works it still makes it difficult to support for most developers.

Two of the key features are discovering new or related content, which is hard to do in mastodon as it needs to calculate similarity across all of the profiles and their content in order to make recommendations -- or collect data like your cell contacts to help you connect with people you already know. Most people don't want contact sharing, and indexing all of the recommended profiles, especially across federated servers is challenging.

The second is engagement based recommendations. Many social media users aren't incredibly active. They want to open the app in specific moments to quickly catch up with everything since they last opened the app. To do this well, you need to know what they've engaged with and look back at content since they last logged on and rank it based on that. People may follow 1000 people, but really care about maybe 30-40 accounts the most. Friends, family, specific journalists or famous people. Mastodon just gives you like a sample of the last 50 or so items. If you follow anyone super active, you may just get a lot of noise in those updates.

Obviously, there are times when everyone wants a linear timeline, but it depends upon their daily use.

Ktheone,

Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days

Edit: Source: mastodon.social/

limerod,

Literally. The android app is superb. It has come a long way with Material You theming, smoothness, and stuff. Compare that to the crap you would call twitter, X or whatever.

kokesh,
@kokesh@lemmy.world avatar

How do you sign up? I’m on the wait list for about a half year.

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