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Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

I notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?

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To be clear, since the mobile app users are decreasing, what you would actually need to claim is that "web users are more likely to continue using the app than mobile users are", not just that "there are a lot of web users", since the base assumption is that web and mobile users use the site in similar ways. I don't really see any reason to believe the former, and actually having worked on social media extensively I think there's a strong chance that the opposite is true, that if mobile users are declining web users are declining even faster. There's a reason sites push mobile apps so much and it's because retention is normally far better.

A cursory search of bluesky web vs. mobile (surprisingly) suggests that the web experience might actually be better and users seems to recommend it over the app.

This is rare but does suggest a possible effect where users realize this over time and switch.

I am extremely active on Bluesky, particularly on mobile. I use the PWA instead of the app on mobile. It works better for me.

Here’s another site that tracks monthly active users based on people posting or other activity such as liking a post. It also shows a decline in activity. Scroll down and it looks like a decline of about 40% over a year.

https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m

90% of those disappeared users were banned for not being members of their bubble.

Same. With the exception of Reddit (which I use a different client for anyway), I tend to just use the sites themselves.

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.

Not only that, part of the point of the whole "atproto" business is to allow alternate frontends and backends. The official mobile app is kind of bad. A number of people have migrated to Blacksky (alternate backend) following a moderation fallout as well.

I’m probably in the minority but 99% of my bsky usage is on web desktop.

Not having the app installed but being a monthly active user, not just someone who's driving by because they clicked on a link on mobile seems like an edge case and I'm pretty sure it won't make a difference to the numbers.

A website being used in a web browser seems to you like an edge case?! Really?

If that's really a common view, we really did lose the plot.

For a social media site on mobile, yes.

We really lost the plot, then. None of the user-facing and user-benefiting features of the social media apps need native-specific capabilities.

It's never about the technology or if it's theoretically feasible but that tracking, push notifications and ad blocking are much better handled in mobile apps for most platforms.

I'm not sure I follow. Do you think that someone using the Twitter app is more or less tracked than someone using their mobile web browser?

More, as you have the advertising identifiers from Apple / Google on mobile and you are also not able to block tracking scripts / tracking ads like on mobile web (At least not without more effort or installing additional software or a vpn).

Then we are in agreement: native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.

This is not true. I’ve worked in this space. Whenever users had the choice, they chose native iOS about two thirds of the time, native Android about a quarter of the time, and web about 10% of the time. This is across all platforms, including desktop, so the actual user preference for web was even lower than that. We didn’t care which platform people used and weren’t pushing people onto native.

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.

You are talking about their choices over distribution channels. I'm talking about who gets to benefit about the features offered by these platforms.

> native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.

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.

Because the web as an application platform sucked back then.

People wanted them because mobile web sites sucked, and because it was difficult to build a decent mobile UX using early mobile web tech. That’s not true anymore but people still reach for apps by reflex even though it makes absolutely no sense most of the time. I don’t want your native code running on my device if a website serves the purpose just as well.

The “why are you making me use an app” backlash will come eventually and nobody will be saying “people want apps” anymore.

I have zero social media apps installed. Nobody in my family has social media apps. We are not the majority, but we do exist…

I have no idea how Bluesky works as native app, always used the mobile Web version.

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.

One of the main reasons I don't use the app is that it makes it harder to bookmark.

My problem is usually that I bookmark in the app, but then forget about the bookmarks as they are in the walled garden. I've built something for that a few years ago (https://getbirdfeeder.com) that just sends me my Bluesky (And X, Mastodon etc.) bookmarks straight to my email inbox once a month.

That's funny because the Bluesky app is the only social media app that I have installed. Everything else I do from the browser.

I only install games, apps that are required by specific services in the country, and the streaming apps due to the download capability, everything else is mobile Web.

You aren’t logged in on the browser when you use it?

The figures used don't count browser users at all, signed in or not

Weird why not? I can’t read the article due to some nightmarish anti Adblock software they use wtf

So you didn’t read the article, made an assumption about its content, question someone who did, then blame Adblock for your confusion, instead of just following the conversation?

No I was confused that they wouldn’t count the browser users when there is no good reason to when they try to eval their user base? MAU commonly includes web users as well.

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?

I've been an active user for ages now and I didn't even know they had an app! the mobile website works very well.

> you don't need to use a mobile app

Since they're apparently tracking mobile app MAUs as a KPI, expect this to change.

I sincerely hope not. That would not have the intended effect on me: I’d stop using bluesky. I’m just not that addicted to it.

In fact, this is the same codebase as Bluesky uses react-native-web.

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