Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected. Most stats seem to be leveling off (which isn't exactly stable growth either so the rest of your points stand).
I understand that as a Bluesky user the peak and dropoff doesn't hurt the experience. But investors are going to put money in with the expectation of a return and what they're going to look at are the derivatives of the adoption curve: how quickly is it gaining users, and is adoption accelerating?
What's probably true is that if they found a stable source of revenue they wouldn't have to answer these kinds of questions. But this is just back to my original point, of "I don't see how this is going to work", because I don't see how they're going to do that.
I'd be happy if someone jumped in and set me straight with a clear and plausible plan. To me, though, from the information I've seen, it looks like the premise here is that they're going to raise again, and to do that they're going to need to demonstrate accelerating growth, which they starkly do not have right now.
If it helps, nothing I'm saying has anything to do with whether ATProto will succeed. ATProto could succeed (and fulfill one possible overarching goal of the PBC) and Bluesky would still not be a long-term viable forum for scientific communication (because it will stop existing in its current form).
That just isn't a "sharp decline" no matter how much you seem to want to repeat those words.
Last year in November they had around 1.3MM posters. Today, 0.65MM.
Followers: 3MM, to 0.4MM today.
I'm not rooting for them to fail. I use Bluesky. I find Twitter's ownership odious and the platform significantly worse than it was 4 years ago.
But if we're talking about scientific communicators talking about where the future of scientific communication is going to happen, it is relevant whether Bluesky has a long-term future. There's another non-Twitter social network that doesn't operate under this funding pressure!
A presidential election spike is the baseline for tracking growth in a social media platform??
What’s “user stock”? Is that the number of registered accounts? Isn’t it basically impossible for that to do anything but go up? It’s the number of people actively using the network that’s the important figure, not the total number of people who ever used it.
Are these the figures you are reporting?
> We made a new Bluesky stats page to see how the platform is growing. Unfortunately it is currently shrinking.
> Last week the total number of users registered hit 36M, but actually only 13M of those showed any activity in the last 90 days.
> Bluesky User Stats/Growth: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
— https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1kxib89/blue...
Right now that shows 5.6M MAUs.
> The number of active users (posting, liking or following) is down by 6.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of unique accounts posting at least once a day is down by 5.6% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of posts created each day is down by 4.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of likes given each day is up by 0.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of users liking posts each day is down by 6.1% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of new follows each day is down by 19.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
Also check the account age stats:
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-account-age
> 32.1K New accounts per day since the beginning
> 23.7K New accounts per day in the last 30 days
> 14K New accounts per day in the last 7 days
New accounts per day appears to be getting much worse over time.
Last year in August they had 150k posters. Today they have 650k.
Followers: 50k to 400k today
It looks like Bluesky is going to be shedding active for the near future, probably settling around a million users active per day.
Odd. Here's another BlueSky stats page, and almost every metric is in the red.