they kinda already did
through the initial media coverage and the people involved a lot of current still-somewhat X/Twitter user think of it as Twitter 2.0 and plan to go there ones it's more finalized/ready
mainly as far as I can tell there are a lot of people stuck on Twitter which do not like it anymore for various reasons but need something with decent discoverability which mastodon seems to not have so well
so if they manage to deliver in that area I would think they have a "not so small" user base already secured
but we will see
Or do we have a good reason to believe the active user counts posted by Elon and others are fake?
but there is a huge difference between "active user who wants to use it" and "active user who wants to not use it but due to network effects can't"
It's kinda a similar situation like with Facebook (and just Facebook, not Meta in general).
- they have some loyal groups (e.g. Facebook people broadly around 60 and older)
- they lost any interest (and much goodwill) from many other groups
- but due the various network effects many of the "lost interest" people still have it and might still count as active users depending on definition of active (but in practice they are passive not active users, unwilling to spend money on it, unwilling to give it any information about themself and not necessary the best ad targets either as there is a risk of you company being associated with "that annoying thing they would which to just discard".
Just with the difference that with Twitter most of the "passive" users are still active because they haven't found an alternative to be active on YET
I think the core issue is that despite how stupid and shitty it's become and seems intent on continuing to become, Twitter is still Twitter and Twitter users don't want BlueSky or Threads, they want Twitter which is still Twitter despite Elon and co's best efforts.
Also the ability for users to fact-check ads is still hilarious and entertaining which almost offsets the amount of ads.
It also seem to be dying user wise outside of some communities, but I think it's will be like the death of Facebook. Slow, and due to network effects never complete. Through it has much less network effects then Facebook had (no family main communication, old now distant friend main communication etc.).
it doesn't help that Threads through their action already kinda made it clear that their compatibility with mastodon and co. falls in the "embrace extend extinguish" category
and just by the fact that Threads is from Meta it can't be Twitter 2.0, to many people refuse to use meta products of any kind as much as possible as they fundamentally do not trust Meta at all
You see this in the way high-ish follower count folks are constantly pruning their follows to signal some kind of ratio. I guess that signal produces some outcome.
HN’s staying power as just about the best forum of remotely general interest might have a lot to do with there not being followers (along with a crack team of elite mods and other things). You can rack up karma but it’s a side quest, join date matters a bit on a boundary condition, but mostly there’s not really any raw fame factor outside a few hyper-famous folks.
I wonder if there’s any scalability past HN size on that.
Well, this is a positioning of Bluesky in the market: they position Bluesky as an attractive product for users who are interested and knowledgable about technological topics. I guess if they have an initial user base of this group, and this group loves the product, they will take the next step and analyze how to grow from this to a larger group of (potential) users.
BlueSky was founded October 2021, while Mastadon exists since 2016. The latter thus had lot more time to get traction. :-)
If you don't like those, anyone can develop a feed algorithm and anyone can subscribe to it, so you can have topic based feeds like "Science" or you can have feeds that just change the way the feed behaves like "OnlyPosts", which is the following feed but with no reposts or replies.
I feel like this is a recognizable genre of comment. I consider myself a big time Mastodon supporter and am proud to be an evangelist for it. One thing you would see in HN comment threads were these first time users claiming all the content was X where X was something very unusual, extreme, and the claims regarding what that extreme thing was would be completely all over the map. They would also be subjective, hard to prove or disprove, but also way out of line with my personal experience and the experience of others who had used Mastodon for anything beyond a trial period.
It looks like we're getting the same version of this type of comment now, except it's for Blue Sky. I've used the app on my phone and computer, followed a few people, followed a handful of discovery feeds. I can't really prove anything here, but I think whether it's Mastodon, whether it's Blue Sky, whether it's Lemmy, I feel like the most outrageous and unreliable comments have tended to be the genre of "skeptical new user sharing their first impression" style comments, which make broad brush claims as to what "most" of the content is on a given platform.
I'm not even a fan of Blue Sky for numerous reasons I won't get into here, but I've had an account for, perhaps a few months now, but, as I often find myself saying when it comes to new platforms, it is not at all my experience that I'm seeing furry porn and rage bait. If there's any one thing noticeably unique in my experience so far, it's the general lowered temperature you feel in your feed compared to Twitter.
Lemmy has some content problems, but I haven't ever noticed it nearly as bad. Mastodon is somewhere in between, but at least there's some good stuff there. Threads is definitely the chillest microblog platform but feels a bit too artificial at times. I would personally take Twitter, even at its current state, over Blue Sky all day long.
The lesson of the past 15 years is that creating a "global town hall" with hundreds of millions of daily users doesn't guarantee profitability. So why not decentralize and try to go small and local, like the phpBB forums that are still chugging along?
Centralisation is a feature in social networks: being able to find your friends is the very first thing. But don't then pretend you aren't.
Every now and then I post to Bluesky asking: so what's the loadout for Bluesky? How many servers does it take to run this thing? What would it take to run my own?
These questions never quite seem to get answered or documented that I could find.
A "PDS" is a reasonable Ubuntu box. They seem unable to admit what it takes to run the rest, though.
Similarly, if a relay decides to nullroute you, you are functionally up on shitcreek, which because it's all handled by the relay is way worse than getting a Mastodon instance filtered.
If we use a torrent analogy, it's not possible to use Bluesky/ATproto with DHT/peer discovery, you're required to connect to a tracker who then decides who you can peer with.
(Relatedly, AcitivityPub also supports the use of relays for discovery, but doesn't require them. It's just not often used because they tend to be a moderation firehose.)
[0]: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture
Similarly, the fact Bluesky is offering a PDS implementation for self-hosting[0] but not a relay[1] tells me that hosting a relay is more than a non-trivial matter, although I'd love to be proven wrong there.
[0]: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
[1]: Well, outside of literally deploying Blueskys own implementation - https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/tree/main/cmd/bigsk... .
I thought it was already positioned as a Twitter competitor with the aim to make it harder to censor. Its aim is to replace Twitter.
And how is that a sustainable business?
This problem has already been solved by Telegram.
You will never get censorship-free anything if there's money to be made by making it not so. Bluesky, Nostr, all these non-Twitter Twitters will also cater to advertiser needs as soon as VC money enters the picture.
But you're right however this is HN not WSJ.
Bluesky is dead as a product.