Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I blame TechCrunch for creating a website that I can’t read but yea fair criticism I didn’t read the article.
I didn’t question GP i asked if they knew why web users aren’t counted.
Do they explain in the article why they would only count mobile users as MAU?
If that's really a common view, we really did lose the plot.
Users genuinely prefer native apps. People don’t seem to have any problem accepting this when you compare things like Electron to desktop apps. It matters even more on resource-constrained mobile devices.
We literally built the apps because people wanted them. The whole reason the App Store exists is because when Steve Jobs told everybody that to build iPhone apps you should build web apps, people revolted and demanded native apps. The preference for native apps over web apps predates the App Store.
The “why are you making me use an app” backlash will come eventually and nobody will be saying “people want apps” anymore.
Same applies to every other social media web sites I use, and yes I need to click away the banner that regularly asks to install the native app, which would anyway be Electron for mobile.
Part of it is just not wanting those apps to invade the rest of my life. I know I can turn off notifications and things, but for some weird reason it helps me stay a bit more detached from social media when I'm forced to rely on the site.
The other part is privacy. I don't want the Facebook app on my phone. I don't want to have to worry about what permissions it wants and whether I've unchecked the right things. Using the web is easier for me in that respect.
This is rare but does suggest a possible effect where users realize this over time and switch.
Since they're apparently tracking mobile app MAUs as a KPI, expect this to change.
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
The only source of truth is hosted by bluesky
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1892 https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2821
Also, the firehose is not strictly necessary either if you’re willing to give up seeing replies from anyone, anywhere and just see the feeds you subscribe to, like an RSS reader.
The hard part is moderation and keeping up with changes in regulations, not the infrastructure itself. Also, continued funding for new development is good. I’m interested in seeing what the permissioned data proposal [1] turns into.
[1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0016-p...
Meanwhile there's a lot of topics where a critical mass of fans only really exists on Big Tech Social Media and maybe the occasional subject subreddit. The hope of an open platform at scale is to expose those niche interests to open infrastructure.
> Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
It likely is the default of Twitter refugees, but as a Mastodon user none of this is relevant to me! I don't care how many more users a network has, as long as the one I'm on has a healthy number. Very few of the people I follow are likely to leave Mastodon.
I find Mastodon/the fediverse has far better engagement and longevity due to being open source and decentralized.
Bluesky is an island on its own, just trying to be a Twitter copy and nothing more.
Of course we were naïve--verified accounts had their own system so they didn't need to interact with us plebs. But in the pre-LLM, pre-bot farm, pre-social media team era, Twitter still represented a genuine public commons. Obama got elected in 2008 due to grassroots activism via social media. Trump got elected through concerted social media manipulation informed by Cambridge Analytica. No matter your political persuasion and opinion on the outcome, the differing methods demonstrate how fundamentally Twitter changed in the interim.
I feel like Bluesky is closest to that original Twitter, except stripped of the notable and influential public sphere. Like if all I wanted to do was interact with my knitting and basket weaving peeps, it's perfect. But Twitter is where the Osama bin Ladin assassination was unwittingly live-tweeted by some guy in Abbottabad. "I get my news from social media" is a negative thing today, implying you are fully captured by the algorithm and manipulated by the people that run bot farm. "I get my news from Twitter" used to mean that you were very well informed and knew what was going on before even the 24/7 news networks. That's not going to happen on Bluesky.
Neither have any shot of being a twitter replacement. Bluesky has a culture problem and a dishonesty about being p2p problem, and mastodon is too slow/heavy and has a mod problem that is intolerable without a better story about user mobility between servers.
Twitter may just die by itself if somehow a better way for people to publicize their work comes into existence, but all traditional means have been rolled up into big opinionated gatekeeping conglomerates who simply ignore things that compete with any of their interests or threaten any of their advertisers or owners. But even if twitter dies, people aren't moving to bluesky or mastodon.
Twitter has something like a half a billion users. So it wins I guess...
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.
And I actually wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about atproto. I'm mildly curious about whether anyone is doing anything with it.
And a whole bunch of other stuff about whether people should even be on bluesky, or should be instead on other federations, and it all just feels so meaningless to me.
It's as if someone has invented a few different ways to print, and there's a million interesting things to write about, but everyone in my echo chamber is talking about whether we should be using A4 or letter sized paper.
And to be clear, this is the "for you" feed even after some shaping, the official discover feed is so much US politics it's straight unusable. Plenty of politics still leaks through to "for you", but it's a manageable amount.
There's a dotnet feed I follow too, but honestly it's hard to find any real people to follow between the dotnet foundation reposts, the linkedin grade BS, and the lost musicians. ( Not their fault, the feed picks up any mention of F# as being dotnet! )
Like I said, I want to make bluesky work, it ought to have less engagement bait, and less lock out of anonymous users, but there's a still a lack of critical mass of real people.
Fix your feeds then. I don't have this issue
It would be the same if they do ATP.
I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.
Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.
I don't think there's anything other than - there are more people on twitter; due to first mover advantage and inertia
Twitter was at its best when it was just a bunch of people figuring out what the fuck it was in the first place. Posting into the ether. Responding to random strangers. Chatting with friends. Whatever.
These sites need less focus on driving engagement, less tools to direct attention to one's post, and more of a focus on organic posting.
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...
Are these numbers skewed somehow?
Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account.
There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky. "JD Vance Becomes Most Blocked Person on BlueSky Days After Joining App" <https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-bluesky-blocked-social-med...>
Even Bluesky's top users say so.
"Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the 'lack of diversity of thought' is actually pushing users back to X" <https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/bluesky-backfiring-mark-cuban...>
"Bluesky is not the good place" <https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replace...>
But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link,
>This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game.
That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.
> What does this comment even mean
“It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”
- Colin Robertson
How, when according to you, they're dominating Reddit and Bsky?
Baring the possibility that people on the left use all the platforms, and people on the right don't for some reason, an excess on one platform has to mean a shortage on another.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
Why is that so important?
On Mastodon, if someone keeps posting political stuff to the point where it's a big chunk of my feed, I merely unfollow. As a result my feed has very little politics. Can't you simply do that on Bluesky?
Of course, if you actively want politics, but want just the right kind of politics, then you've dug yourself into a hole.
You are describing X here. It kind of turned into a very toxic political platform. The exodus to Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky happened for a good reason. After Elon Musk took over it didn't exactly improve.
I'm on still on X, and on Bluesky and Mastodon. For my network of perfectly normal people, most of them did not delete their X account but just aren't very active there any more. Quite a few showed up on Bluesky in the last year or so (30-40%) and some also on Mastodon (~20%). But that just leaves a long tail of random accounts I followed on Twitter that I don't really miss that much. Many of them have gone silent in any case.
I actually don't mind Bluesky. I pretty much ignore algorithmic feeds and just consume content from people I happen to follow in the order it is published. If what you see is blue-haired loonies, might I suggest following less of those.
Organizing people in lists is helpful as well. Mostly the people I follow are the same people I used to follow on X. Their political leanings didn't really change and they still talk about the same kinds of topics. It's just that the noise of random nut bags that I wasn't following to begin with dominating my X feed is completely gone. I don't miss that at all.
Unless you want to expose yourself to the constant inundation of piss that social media has become, you have to curate and block aggressively. Shared block lists that you just subscribe to are one of the few useful innovations Bluesky has made and they need to be standard for all social media in the future.
Thanks to those lists I am blocked by 165 people. I don't insult anyone, I don't even swear. I suspect I get on these lists simply by being a white male (which is I guess obvious from my posts).
The reason is obviously not being a "white male" - because there are plenty of white males on Bluesky. If these are the kind of comments you make there it's no wonder people block you.
I don't know what a "soft block" would be, either someone is blocking you or they aren't. Anything that makes curation difficult is doomed to fail because bots and assholes scale exponentially while my time is precious, linear and all too limited. Harsh general mechanisms are sometimes necessary, and no one owes you their time or space.
Apparently I'm blocked by two people. I have absolutely no idea why - maybe it's because I follow Hank Green and he's being cancelled? I barely even use Bluesky. But they have every right to do it and they don't owe me an explanation.
Then again if racists block me it's probably for the best.
I, politely, corrected some people who were posting factually inaccurate anti-AI misinformation.
I was mocked and insulted, called transphobic by someone I had no way of knowing was Trans, accused of mansplaining, and called misogynistic by people I didn't know (or care to know) were women. None of them bothered to discuss the original issue.
It's like arguing about geo-politics with the dude who sleeps in the dumpster behind the liquor store. Even if I win... What was the point?
people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.
So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.
I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.
Information on bots on Bluesky is limited, but from digging around for a few minutes, Bluesky users report 15-40% of their followers are bots. You seem fairly confident about Bluesky having far fewer bots and fewer foreign agents, so if you have a good link on Bluesky bot and foreign influence statistics, please share it here!
The bots and trolls and agents on X are always on your front porch.
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
Indistinguishable from Stormfront. And his account (along with other far-right accounts) are the most engaged-with accounts on the platform.
They're all paid accounts mostly claiming to be from poorer ex-Commonwelath colonies and some deep South Asia, slowly spreading eastward. Many are obviously pasting LLM generated responses, sometimes even leaving in "here are response ideas for such tweet" parts. They're slowly giving up on trying to say anything relevant to Twitter trends and resorting to cultist Islamic or biblical something, but they're still operating in some crazy numbers. Blocking or reporting makes no difference since they never get banned anyway and the accounts are constantly rotated. You can't block 10m acccounts manually.
It just makes no sense that this is even a naturally occurring problem that can be mitigated by some tips and tricks. Clearly it's organized, connected, with a lot of money and effort poured in.
I stopped using Bluesky because I was seeing too many people celebrating the misfortune of others. I didn't have that on twitter, I know people were on the platform behaving like that, but it didn't seem to be what was delivered to me.
I was never a big user of either though. I suspect my lifetime sum of Tweets and Blurts would be under 50.
There isn't an infinite pool of bots out there seeking to get into anything they can. There are like, at most twenty bot actors and they're focused on the most lucrative targets.
Remember when the entire car insurance phone spam in the USA turned out to just be one guy with an army of proxies. There are surprisingly few people at the top of the worldwide spam operations.
Being small enough that malicious actors are not interested in you is beneficial, but by definition it is a solution that cannot be widely adopted.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Pew found 16% of U.S. teens used X in 2025, versus 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014–15.
(In a market with strong network externalities, being the dominant player is self reinforcing and it takes failing hard to lose that positions, and its naturally hard to compete because getting users is a chicken and egg problem.)
That's aside from the blatant echo chamber nature of the platform. Both the left and the right post on Twitter. Only the left post on BlueSky.
This probably contributes to the decline, but I think the biggest contributor is the lack of interesting content. If you wanted to gorge on leftist viewpoints wouldn't you just read a leftist subreddit?
BlueSky isn't an experience set by the owners, it's an experience set by interacting with its people.
In a way it's good: X is now much better that the more radical Bluesky types went away.
Maybe the "trick" is to have inertia and network effect. Facebook somehow has 3 billion monthly active users despite literally everything.
Loads of politicians, governments, sports figures, and social media stars set up accounts back when Twitter was just a conversation platform, before people were yipping about "catering" to left or right (whatever that silly nonsense means), and the amazing stickiness of the network effect means they're still there.
People just seem to leave social media entirely.
TikTok and YouTube are still growing, while Reddit, Facebook, X and the rest are stagnant or shrinking
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.
Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw)
(Threads is always there for the normies until it enshittifies and Meta chases whatever catches Mark's eye next)
But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.
Given what Musk did back at the time - member him carrying a sink? Randomly unplugging servers? - it was not that much of a stretch to assume the BS would eventually catch up with him and Twitter would enter the FO phase of FAFO.
Unfortunately, for unfathomable reasons Twitter is still alive somehow, despite being a cesspit of Russian propaganda, far-right propaganda, general trolls and a ton of porn sellers... I frankly assume the porn is what keeps a lot of people on there instead of Truth Social or one of the countless other attempts.
I don't think that Bluesky is a success as an app or site, I think it's an example of ideological stagnation and evidence of an online political culture that's come unmoored from reality, which seems to be the trend for social media. It's not a very good place to be, and the most active parts of it are frankly really boring and thoughtless just like the rest of the social media landscape... albeit with a left-of-center flavor. As for the protocol... great? I've been hearing about the next big thing in fighting centralization and corporatization here for a loooong time, and it really feels like Charlie Brown kicking at the spot where a football used to be, over and over.
If the point is to come up with novel solutions to a problem in service of a tiny minority represented here... then great. It's a success. If the point is to ever compete with something on a different scale then this seems like treading water to me.
I liked Josh Barro's take: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...
It's a lesson I think we all need to learn over and over: the loudest are not really the most representative, they're just the loudest. Online I'd add that they're often the craziest and least able to compromise.
The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideological, which is why its boosters sound like evangelists.
This is just media promotion, hopefully to bump up user numbers for a week or two, but really so the people who work at the VC firms that put money into this dog have something to show to their bosses.
I'd disagree with that, I'd say its entire life is due to the shittifying of Twitter. People, like myself, sought to recreate the experience of what Twitter used to be like and (after trying and not being satisfied with Mastodon) it's the next best thing. The problem is that a social network of this kind relies on having a large enough population to feel "live" and Bluesky has never got there.
There have been glimmers of hope... during the NBA finals and the World Cup Bluesky felt like a genuine destination for live sports. But it might be too little too late.
They were hoping that twitter would go the way of Digg. It's very similar to the fantasy that they had about Reddit after the API shutdown. Slacktivism.
The fact that twitter is as active as ever is why they slink back. I'd bet 90% of actives on bluesky also have twitter accounts that are more active. Twitter didn't care when they walked away; in fact it was a relief. A great many of them were extreme trolls and reply guys who spent the rest of their time mass-reporting people for disagreeing with them.
And for the few people who thought of this as the p2p answer to twitter (an obsession among programming p2p nerds - including me - for a long time) it has to be a disappointment that the company obviously has no intention of relinquishing control of a thing.
You are projecting a lot on this imaginary Bluesky user. You’ve crafted an entire narrative in your head about how egotistical they were and how crushed they are at Twitter still being around. I don’t really know how to respond to creative fiction.
I’m not put off by his desires but I’m mildly surprised you’re denying him and others existence. Ironically, it feeds into the GP’s “silence” narrative
Have you tried X recently? My feed right now is:
- A neat tech bag
- Discussion about AI going rogue
- How fee markets on Hyperliquid work
- Someone who was ill from a viral infection talk about his recovery
- Someone from Team17 talking about the game Worms
It's very much what Twitter used to be like
Are they implying a causal relationship between their shrinking user base and their focus expansion? The article doesn't give any proof whatsoever.
Thread’s notifications are just plain weird like it is usually clickbait where you can’t tell if they love Trump or hate Trump and if the one sexy cosplayer/alt fashion model I follow because I know her in IRL did something provocative with her friend who has tattoos from head to toe, Threads thinks this is front page news.
He can say whatever he wants, but buying one of the biggest social network to push his ideology onto billions leaves "freedom of saying whatever one wants" territory to enter "let's buy elections by controlling what enter people's feeds".
Twitter's fundamental issue is that it's entire pitch is "You can say the most outrageous things on the planet, share race-baiting videos, and be a scumbag as long as it doesn't anger Elon. Also, we're down with child pornography"
Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones who were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place.
See how that works?
Much of this has eroded over the years because of competitive platforms like Instagram but these initial conditions remain formidable.
Threads was started up because of the business opportunity of Musk fumbling things, but Bluesky seemed almost annoyed by all the new users.
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
Code: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Website: https://atproto.com/
The funniest part is that there is a better algorithm. It's right here: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-...
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
Almost as bad as tiktok repeatedly showing you promos for the same product because you didn't swipe away in less than five seconds.
Who invented all of these algorithms? I want none of this.
I want good news, awesome things, uplifting stories, cool hacks. That's it. That's literally it.
So I think social media which is content/image based can be more positive than the discussion based media.
However we're getting more and more AI slop and AI generated art and reels and while people for the most part destroy it in the comment section, it would be nice for them to never show up in my feeds.
This is my actual experience on X. Find interesting people to follow. The "muted words" feature is great for filtering out political noise.
> And for the record I'm definitely not saying the left is somehow perfect. Obviously the left is a bit of a mess too. It's just that they're not the same kinds of messes across party lines.
Seems like you've fallen to the same fallacy within the same paragraph, which is quite ironic.
This is exactly the kind of thing the parent poster was talking about.
The Democrats certainly aren't left, and they're not great, but we live in a world where the Republican party ranges between refusing to condemn and openly supporting white nationalism, gloats about making trans people's lives worse, encourages police to use unnecessary force, etc. even before we get in to the impacts of their economic policies.
Despite being a massive disappointment as far as actually making positive changes, one is still obviously miles better than the other because they're not trying to drive the car the wrong way as fast as possible. Claiming that the two major US parties are no different requires willfully ignoring a lot of bad stuff that one party does for which there is no comparison on the other side. There are absolutely specific issues on which there is often no meaningful difference but as a whole there is a universe of difference.
Some people just can't not think in shades of gray.
Even worse than Mastodon's?
I agree that the Discover feed sucks (why does it show posts from people I’m following when there’s a dedicated tab for that?). But I’d rather have a better Discover feed than me having to do more work on the “For You” feed.
I think it's part of an interactions object passed to the feed operator. You can see what's potentially passed here[2].
[0]:https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/post/3lxx...
[1]:https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/pull/8672
[2]:https://endpoints.bsky.app/#bluesky-app/tag/appbskyfeed/POST...
The one where war crimes are directly equivocated and WW3 is regularly threatened?
The one where anti-vax conspiracy is gospel, up is down, and black is white?
Get the biggest pile of hippy dippy bullshit together and you'll never compare to the toxic waste dump of "Truth" Social.
I reposted one picture of my favorite bird, the albatross, and then my feed was 100% bird pictures. I'm not interested in birds generally, just albatrosses specifically. But they were nice enough pictures so I kept using the app.
Then I tried telling it about my other interest which was robotics, and so I started liking posts about autonomous cars. Specifically, one day I liked a picture of some guy filming in in his car some other guy sleeping in his Tesla while it was driving autonomously on the highway.
After that my feed was flooded with selfies of dudes in their car. Like, "goodmorning sunshine, off to work, here's a quick selfie of me". Every time I opened the app it was just a parade of bird pictures and selfies of bearded dudes in their cars. At least on Threads the thirst traps were thirsty!
Bluesky had no idea what my interests were. On Threads we used to do a thing like "Hey @algorithm, send me people who are interested in X Y Z" and that worked. Actually first it didn't and then Threads made it official after so many people did it. But even still when it wasn't official it still seemed Threads was able to provide a better feed than Bluesky.
So I quit. Congrats Bluesky, tough feat but you've somehow found a way to be more annoying than ads.
I so miss the days when the Internet was more random. It's not really nostalgia - it WAS better.
I ended up finding a good group of people to follow on Mastodon so didn’t end up even trying Bluesky (although I do follow some accounts from there through the bridge)
Bluesky tried. But it's not "a decent alternative" - why not?
The fediverse does literally everything better than it. Bluesky by comparison is completely inferior and redundant.