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Comment by singpolyma3 | Hacker News Reader

Based on all the traffic and development activity I'm not sure on what basis one would say "failed"

They had a vision and goal to change social media, to get people away from Big Social. They haven't failed in the technical sense of closing, there are less than 1.5M daily (the stats trackers are starting to shut down), but they will also never fulfill on the promises. In the startup world, this is called a zombie company.

One way they failed hard is that they talked about how they were against the investors and VC incentives, then they took $100M from Bain Capital (PE) just after peak user count, but didn't tell us for almost a year. They could have put up a simple $5/month to support the cause, but they took investor money instead. This is why I left.

Source?

What I see here doesn't look good.

https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth

Never mind the pivot to reddit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit...

What’s the definition of success here? Instagram like user counts?

Arguing that success is purely about the ultra high numbers seems to miss the forest for the trees. Is HN a failure because it did not reach the level of DAU as Reddit? The quality of discussion and community here is certainly substantially higher. I feel the same about Mastodon and Bsky vs Twitter. I’ll take community I actually want to engage with over sheer numbers any day.

Bluesky has about 2-3 year runway, so, we'll see.

Source: Bluesky COO https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/growth-and-su... (somewhere towards the end in the Q&A section).

I think critics would settle for commercial viability, given the funding structure.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

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