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Comment by pathless | Hacker News Reader

I forgot about BlueSky since, around ~2 months ago, every last person I followed on there moved back (reopened) to Twitter due to the user number falloff... I am so out of the loop now

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I guess the people I follow either don't care about the numbers or didn't have that issue, but I'm finding more and more of the people I wanted to read from there everyday, and am enjoying it so much more after a year of engagement bait (or worse) on X. Bluesky to me is what Twitter was a few years ago, which (IMHO) is great.

I think it really depends on the communities you are in. I use Bluesky mostly for ML stuff and Mastodon for more Unixy stuff and my Bluesky feed is quite lively with a good signal/noise ratio. I completely nuked my X account over a month ago, it was just drowning in ragebait and Elon posts (even though I don't follow Elon).

Thats interesting, I have always got far more engagement on Bluesky than Twitter.

They just crossed 33M users. Maybe your microcosm?

https://blueskyusercount.com/

Active monthly is probably a tenth of that. I've made an account 2 or 3 times over the years but never find much to make me stay, I think I delete my accounts tho so I don't know if I'm in that stat.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

https://bsky.app/starter-pack/blueskywins.bsky.social/3ldfxn...

why'd your parent comment get downvoted? 33mm users, <2mm daily likers, <1mm daily posters. as stated, less than a tenth of total user count.

bluesky is a pretty niche bubble-y platform. so are mastodon et al. they're fine if you want to follow a specific group but they aren't even close to the reach of X/Twitter.

Active monthly is 12M so it's a third of that

Clearsky.app reports 31m active.

edit: Misinformation - number is actually 12m.

Depends on who you interact with. Some self-declared twitter-leavers never really left, others absolutely did.

Twitter is very usable once you block Elon and the unhinged conspiracy accounts that he retweets.

I frequently have the opposite problem where the algo is pushing liberal accounts tweeting $OUTRAGE_OF_THE_DAY

Same

For twitter being supposedly a right wing social media platform, the only tweets I see break 100k likes are extremely left wing political takes (and Elon's tweets cause he's almost surely gotten him to be artificially pushed in the algorithm).

I've seen theories that there's like botting happening on those posts, and it kinda seems likely given how little real interaction they get.

i notice the same thing. there are a handful of big rw accounts i've muted and no longer see but big lwers there always seem to be more.

i also muted musk but periodically find my account has magically re-followed him, so i concur that there's almost certainly a special case in the code that artificially boosts/follows him.

The algo is designed to surface accounts you may like to follow. Hence, its called "discover". You may enjoy a custom feed more.

Its like a hydra - more weird accounts pop up despite me blocking every one similar and pressing "not interested".

Never had a similar problem on Bluesky.

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