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Comment by pelagic_sky | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky is dead in the water. There was a point where people were talking about it and wanted in. No one (in my social sphere) is talking about it anymore. I even mentioned it at work (FAANG) the other day and most people haven’t even heard of it. I’d love for it to be a thing. But history dictates they missed the opportunity.

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My experience is exactly the opposite. Most of my social sphere has already moved to Bluesky. Also most of the top posters I used to follow on Twitter have either migrated or post on both. As a result I've been spending more time on Bluesky than Twitter recently. It's the future.

But you are right that while it remains invite-only it is limited. The real test will happen when they open the floodgates.

I’ve worked at two FAANGs and while I respect my former colleagues, I wouldn’t consider them harbingers of what’s cool.

If you/we/other folk want it to be a thing, shouldn't we at least try to not frame it as a 'dead in the water' piece of tech?

Seeing how HN has a way of planting seeds in the minds of potential early adoptors, framing it as DOA may be the self-fulfilling prophecy we want to avoid if we want changes to unfold within our heavily centralised social media sphere.

Most people on HN don't have any vested interest in the success or failure of BlueSky. That's a good thing. It means we can actually give our honest opinions rather than equivocate in order to prop up a dead project in a kind of virtual recreation of Weekend at Bernie's.

Honestly, even without Threads I would not bet on BlueSky to be the winner in this space or even to be viable. The team got really lucky having the right product at the right time, and failed completely to capitalize on it. Or actually worse, they seemed to not even try to capitalize on it. Even trying and failing would have been bette.r

I don't think it's quite that 'settled' (although, comically, I made my own [much worse] overstatement in a comment this morning).

But, the landscape is certainly a LOT less friendly, at this point. Threads has obviously sucked the oxygen completely out of the room, so to speak, for the moment. Bluesky is likely consigned to a much more niche position, and may have difficulty surviving.

While I think your conclusion is a bit strong at the moment, within 1 - 3 months, it'll probably be far clearer. In particular, depending on how Threads is actually functioning ... if "Meta" plays it smart (and they do seem to be doing a surprisingly clever job, so far) in catering (enough) to users for that initial buy-in ... (the classic "first hit is free" of drug dealers everywhere [though, I don't consider these platforms to be straight-up just person-wrecking drugs, that use-case does hold across plenty of the population, I'd argue])...

I think it's pretty clear now.

Threads is the fastest growing social network and app in history and by now has ~100m users.

Network effects will take care of the rest.

Amazing what having a billion+ users already with a logon/ID can do for uptake!

I'm wondering whether it'll be Apple or Meta that becomes Zetatech...

If you made a new social app that doesn't require an account you would not just get 100 million people to install it. Being able to sign in to an existing account isn't what caused the uptake.

You ignored the bit where I said 'billion+ existing users'. Not exactly 100mil new random users with that install base.

But it isn't relevant. I could say that email has a billion+ existing users with an account that an app could utilize, but adding email signup to a hypothetical app doesn't just get you a ton of users.

I’ve been in the beta for a while and so far I don’t find it useful or entertaining. It’s also really quiet, with only one account I follow consistently updating. This week I started considering deleting my account…

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