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Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features.

That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.

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As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Nobody really uses it like they did twitter. it doesn't have the same vibe. it just feels forced. the science community might save it as a kind of summarizing service.

i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere.

i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky.

bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."

Mastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive.

It's like a compromise between forums and twitter, and there are some great smaller communities out there. When the curation and moderation are good, and the community has a solid purpose, you get gems - quite a few mastodon gems out there.

At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that.

The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.

So did forums, even with no federation.

Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others.

I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.

Why not several identities, and aggregation in the client? You seem to need to be in the community to fully interact with it on Mastodon, anyway.

You'd have to have a lot of trust that the one instance wouldn't get enshittified and end up as another X / Truth Social / BlueSky.

Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation.

Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate.

Having many instances is not the same as federation.

Isn't one a subset of the other? A system with federation must have multiple instances, but a system with multiple instances doesn't need to federate (in the sense of information passing between independently managed instances.)

Yes. My original question was whether federation is necessary for the kind of communities Mastodon serves, not whether the web must have multiple websites.

Some of the worst of the pile-on, scolding, pearl clutching behaviors that made everyone very glad to see certain people leave other platforms make large swathes of bsky totally worthless. It's like a mashup of the worst parts of reddit and twitter.

There are a couple nooks and crannies that are worthwhile, but at scale it's not a good place. The vibe is "something went wrong" and "poor decisions have led me here" and not "warm, welcoming, vibrant, innovative community of wonderful people."

> As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out.

Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.

> There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.

There's something beautiful about a defense of a community that is also a perfect exemplar of that community. Bit fractal, init?

I personally find it less toxic than Xitter and that’s good. Less drama, lots of politics - which is probably normal at the moment but kind of annoying. Certain bubbles like gamedev are big. I think bsky is here to stay.

Spot on observation. The very class of interaction indeed.

The experience you describe has been completely different from mine. I’m not a big poster, but I use Bluesky daily for:

- Sports

- Law

- Authors

- Comedy

- Video Games

- Programming news

- Other general news

Really feels like you are projecting a bit.

What’s unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I don’t have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates.

I use Bluesky to keep up with software development news. The ability to default to my "following" feed is a big plus. I mostly see software related stuff and the stream of posts is slow enough that I reduced my time spent on the app.

On twitter it highly depends on who you're following. If you specifically wanted to avoid political posts, it's not that hard to steer your algorithm that way. I follow ~130 people, and outside of maybe 4 of them who I like hearing political comments from, I only get interesting tech/tech-adjacent discussions. Almost zero politics.

In the past, whenever I get some politics stuff or celebrity news in the main feed, I just press "not interested" and relatively quickly those types of posts stop showing up.

On the other hand, I'm not sure who actually uses bluesky. Can't say I've ever felt the desire to go on there.

Launching in early 2026, Eurosky Social [0] is coming.

> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.

> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.

[0] https://www.eurosky.social

Thanks for the link. Seems like they want to be a European identity (and maybe more) provider for the AT protocol.

> We’re launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026]

I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true.

Looks like they are ready to scoop up a bunch of EU grant money, perhaps at fediverse's cost. Esp. since it looks (not sure) that an AI company is behind the initiative: https://themodalfoundation.org/

Yes, it's weird to be predicting the future when you can't predict the past. It's been negative over the entire year; the only growth it ever had was between Trump's election and inauguration: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.

Steady might be just fine if a higher majority of those users are writers and publishers and not just consumers.

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