22 million users
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.
I’m sorry but that is cope. Imagine if someone said that in the time of telephone?
Oh sure you can’t call much of anyone who aren’t on your street but making a good telephone network isn’t about numbers and infinite growth.
We know of network effects and critical mass. It would have been great if mastodon could have resolved its unacceptable idiosyncrasies to capture the death of twitter. Looks like we now have to wait for the death of bluesky in 2036 for the next try.
I’ve been on many, many social media sites even some you may have never heard of, even moderated globally for at least one of them, some I moderated groups on.
I never enjoyed them because they were commercial and the only thing that matters to commercial sites is money and growth, not good moderation, not creating sustainability etc.
All of them eventually enshittified or were shit from the beginning.
Mastodon, after a brief period of not understanding it, is the only one I have ever felt comfortable on and the only one that despite people nay-saying it has continued to tick along from strength to strength whilst all others I have seen get worse because they have, and always will be about money and squeezing the life out of it by requiring as many people as possible, anything else effectively doesn’t matter because money is what drives them.
So no, it is not a ‘cope’ or whatever ridiculous concept comes next, I’ve personally seen the effects of what happens time and time again and it’s never good.
As for the telephone, well, personally, I’ve never been a fan, a worldwide global network where anyone can reach you whenever they want by knowing a number and more and more sites insisting you hand it over. The irritating grating noises they make, the distractability of modern ones because they have to get you hooked and dependent on them so they can make money off of all that personal data. The fact that there is 0 end-to-end encryption built into the networks themselves and likely never will be, that it can cost so much because those that run it are greedy, taking not just your money but also your time, count me out.
Technology is controlled by and for those that run it and so far, mastodon is the only network I have seen that actually cares about things like sustainability, good community and really considering the tech and trying to influence it to be better in ways that are for the user not corporations. All the rest? Well, they’re all shit because their goal is only making money to pay back their investors or because those that run them only care about having as much money and power as possible, or both.
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.
It’s more like a better Twitter
Mastodon and Xitter are missing a lot of the quality of life features of Bluesky.
- Good user verification
- Add lists
- Block lists
- Subscribable topic feeds
- Configurable algorithms
These things make Bluesky very easy to get started with and more powerful even than Xitter was. It’s simply a better product if you have any requirements other than federation. Getting a good feed up and running doesn’t take more than an hour or two. It’s basically possible now on Twitter and it’s very difficult on Mastodon.
Yes, its federation is more or less bullshit, but for most users, that feature is a distant priority when compared to the rest.
There is a blog post from 2023, but worth reading in case you don’t know it:
I wonder how many independent bluesky servers there are.
There are currently zero bluesky servers that aren’t fully dependent on bsky.app.
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
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
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.
Omg literally me
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?
