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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works.

Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech.

If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.

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95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.

Close to nobody should need to understand what decentralisation means. This was/is a problem with Mastodon. When it was new it required understanding things most people didn’t want to know and arguably shouldn’t need to know.

I’m not sure that’s true. We have a lot of people who are invested in the protocol and the technology. I post threads about it periodically, and people are pretty engaged & excited: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y

Outside of tech circles I think that’s generally true. Few people understand what it means for something to be decentralised and fewer people are idealistic enough to care if it means compromising on features.

It’s all about the user experience. See also privacy and security.

Bluesky = 13m users, Mastodon = 9m users.

Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com

Dunno, this account[0] says Mastodon has 15.5m users, says it pulls from https://instances.social/ .. no clue how reliable/accurate their data is though.

[0] https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11327098336778135...

Bluesky has 1.43M daily active users on average and 6M monthly actives.

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

Mastodon has dropped to 800K monthly actives and has no data on daily actives which I would assume that number would be even lower.

Not a good look for Mastodon, considering that huge drop of 400K monthly users on that active users chart and did not recover even after Elon's changes to X, the majority of X users in Brazil chose Bluesky and ignored Mastodon.

More like 2.25mm DAU actually

Watching the firehose events they're probably clearing Mastodon for now. We'll see how that looks after it stabilizes again, the surges tend to have pretty steep dropoffs so far.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

Can we actually count the number of instances and users on Mastodon (the fediverse)? I have alt accounts in at least two separate "bubbles" of servers that only federate with each other and wouldn't show up in stats like this.

This is a rather tricky question. What does count as the fediverse in the first place?

I assume nodes capable of interacting via activity pub? Good question - if a server uses activity pub but not in a way that's compatible with say mastodon (e.g. they use notes for a different purpose), then does this count or not?

I think framing social networks with metrics like number of nodes or active daily users is inadequate and only designed to appeal to some VC/founder mode bros.

X seems to be working quite well. Especially considering the significant reduction in overhead since Elon's purchase.

Do you mean technically or financially?

Anyone on internet can see this Mastodon post with comments. Unfortunately X is only able to display it all to logged-in users. Old Twitter was able to display it to anyone as well. Seems like X is in austerity mode.

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