Bluesky grew by 10% in just two days this week, passing 12M accounts in total | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky grew by 10% in just two days this week, passing 12M accounts in total

bsky.app

27 pointsbbor14 comments

I am one of these people who recently created an account to give it a look. My entire feed was dominated by anime drawings and people eulogising how good Bluesky is because ???. I could not find anything I was actually interested in. I have not been back.

So how much time did you spend looking for feeds and people who match your interests?

There are curated/automated feeds on many topics:

https://bsky.app/feeds

Even those do no justice.

I have been using BlueSky since private invites and with the recent influx it has taken away anything coherent within.

Thought y'all would find this interesting -- TBH I still thought it was still in closed beta. I'm giving it a shot! Some pioneering soul should start a HackerNews "feed" (AKA bot?).

For comparison, Twitter still has ~368M monthly active users and the big dogs even more (e.g. Reddit at 1.2B), so they've got a long way to go. Still, 10% in 2 days is undeniably impressive. At this rate, they'll be at 337M by EOY!

I can't tell if you are being facetious, but that's not how spikes work. Just like Mastodon and threads, it's a temporary spike and will go back to its normal growth in less than a week.

I had several people I follow on Twitter make a grandiose speech about going to Mastodon after musk bought Twitter, but almost all of them came back because nobody uses it. The ones that didn't come back have less than 5% of the followers they used to have.

> have less than 5% of the followers they used to have

Human value ranked by number of social media followers, what a sad world we live in.

I would take the 'Twitter isn't dying' posts with a grain of salt.

Of course the same can be said about the 'Twitter is already dead' narrative. The latter isn't being pushed by a large PR operation, though.

> The ones that didn't come back have less than 5% of the followers they used to have.

Well, first of all, I mean, who cares, honestly, how many followers one has? But also 5% does sound weirdly low. I think I had about a thousand followers on Twitter, which I was on from 2007 to 2022; I've been on Mastodon since 2022 and appear to have 300 there.

Overall, for me, Mastodon's worked out fairly well; it feels rather like noughties-era twitter. YMMV, of course.

[dupe]

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41889027

What’s the cause of the spike?

Twitter changed the policy allowing genAI to use anything you post there? As I understand it, creatives are not happy and leaving.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/17/elon-musks-x-is-changing-i...

They also started allowing users you've blocked to view your tweets.

ExTwitter:

1. Reduced the effectiveness of the blocking other users

2. Changed Terms of Service to let them use or sell your content for machine learning/AI purposes

3. Has seen some in depth coverage about how widespreadly & effective foreign & right wing disinformation networks have been operating. Site looks like it's brand of democracy is anything goes & that includes psyop campaigns against Americans.

4. Has changed the Terms of Service to further disallow academics, researchers, and civic interests from watching the site & doing research. Claiming damages of 1.5 cents per post if you access over 1 mil posts a day. Initiated lawsuits against some groups of disinformation researchers. (Musk's reaction to disinformation is to suppress anyone finding out or safeguarding us? Speech so free we won't be allowed to find out whose even saying it!)

5. Stiffing vendors on the IT bill, to the tune of $60m.

6. Changed the Terms of Service to court shop, using an North Texas court strongly favorable to right wing agenda & Musk's companies. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...

7. Elon's PAC is setting up fake Harris campaign sites. Sites targeting Arabs and Israelis saying diametrically opposed things about Harris. He's also running a raffle if you sign his political pledge in Pennsylvania? And spreading disproven voting machine disinformation at Trump rallies. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musks-fake-sites-a...

8. General existing annoyance that terrible incredibly low quality paid-for accounts drown out interesting conversation. And a new paid creator model focused on paying for engagement that will probably only intensify the shititness & have people responding to crap bluecheck nonsense just to get paid.

Incredibly toxic week or two with rapid-fire massive red flag after red flag, that should really really make people reconsider staying. Even if you "just want to talk tech," the site directionally has been going badly already & that seems slated to intensify. And as per per @paulg: character matters (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1847225545299251597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894566). The problems here are reprehensible. And specifically: living on/contributing to a social network where researchers aren't even allowed to study disinformation is completely unacceptable & recklessly endangers western democratic society, and you should leave at once.

Bluesky laughs about there being an Elon Musk Event driving adoption. But it's been a dazzling multifaceted barrage of truly vile behavior these recent days, and has flipped from being shitty and dumb antics, to actively endangering & giving quarter to enemies of open society.

> 7. Elon's PAC is setting up fake Harris campaign sites. Sites targeting Arabs and Israelis saying diametrically opposed things about Harris. He's also running a raffle if you sign his political pledge in Pennsylvania? And spreading disproven voting machine disinformation at Trump rallies.

Have you come across any research about Musk having potentially been a 'sleeper agent' for the Putinmaga campaign the whole time?

The timing is definitely consistent. Nov 5th is potentially the last non-Orban-style election in the US. If you're going to reveal yourself at all, the ideal time to do it is when you can go all in on influencing the ultimate endgame event.

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