It feels like Bluesky has missed its moment or is possibly chasing the wrong paradigm

[venteto]

Since opening registration to the public, Bluesky's user base seems to have plateaued at just over 5 million users. Mastodon's user base is now 3 times that amount.

Meanwhile new article in Nature shows that many scientists are now finding Reddit to be a useful alternative to Twitter. A notable observation is someone who said on Reddit they feel less like they are posting into the void, as there often wasn't much response on Twitter (and presumably by microblogging extension, Mastodon and Bluesky?).

And then I just observe the differences between Bluesky and writing these "discussion" posts here on GitHub, versus having to connect several 300 character "microblog" posts as a "thread" on Bluesky and its microblogging ancestors (which is why I've have chosen to write something like this here, rather than on Bluesky and trying to mention some revelant Bluesky staff in vain in skeets.

It almost seems like for all the great ideas instigating the AT Protocol, maybe microblogging is not the way forward. Maybe the AT Protocol should be re-oriented around a Reddit-like architecture? Or perhaps include it alongside the microblogging architecture, whether kept separate, or integrated?

Perhaps the changes in API policy at Reddit and the death of the Reddit clone Voat, which turned into yet another alt-right hellscape, offer opportunity to transcend both the old, limiting microblogging paradigm and Reddit itself?

[snarfed]

Since opening registration to the public, Bluesky's user base seems to have plateaued at just over 5 million users. Mastodon's user base is now 3 times that amount.

It's a minor point, but total accounts created isn't really a very useful metric, for a number of reasons. Active user counts, eg MAUs, are much more useful. The fediverse currently has an estimated 1M-1.5M MAUs, which is slightly less than Bluesky's 1.6M.

[emilyhunt]

Also, it took Twitter years to go from a released product to a global household name. There is no hard and fast rule that a successful Twitter replacement needs to instantly grow overnight - Bluesky still has plenty of time left to have its 'moment' and get bigger.

It has a stable initial community, which is the first step.

[mirh]

It's not a minor point, really. Together with the fact that in just two weeks bsky has grown a whole 10%.
Also mastodon's MAUs is 925K here.

[MasterJ93]

You don't have to use app.bsky's lexicons: you can simply stick with the com.atproto ones and create new ones (or use any community-made ones). This means that you can create a "post" lexicon that has the same word count as Reddit (if it has a word count) or an unlimited count. There's one or two groups of people that are making AT Protocol-specific platforms.

Along with what snarfed said, I don't really think it's accurate to say that Bluesky has missed its "moment." There will be other moments: anything Twitter does in terms of something that people end up disliking wholeheartedly is a moment, for example (and they will happen).

[surfdude29]

I agree with what both snarfed and MasterJ93 have said, but I also wanted to engage in a bit of nerdy pedantry about that 15 million total user figure for Mastodon. It's much, much higher than I had previously seen quoted for total Mastodon users, so I did some digging 🧐

The figure of 15 million total users comes from this post which uses figures from this bot which according to its README "counts users from all instances listed at https://instances.social/ then posts statistics to Mastodon."

That seems reasonable enough to me. However, I'm rather confused at how that figure of 15 million is so massively different from the number of total accounts given by the joinmastodon.org API, which currently says that there are just over 8.5 million users.

What explains the difference of 6.5 million users?

It's a minor point, but total accounts created isn't really a very useful metric, for a number of reasons. Active user counts, eg MAUs, are much more useful. The fediverse currently has an estimated 1M-1.5M MAUs, which is slightly less than Bluesky's 1.6M.

Also, following on from the point that snarfed made, I think it's worth pointing out that both Mastodon and Bluesky are currently experiencing a decline in Monthly Active Users (MAU).

According to the joinmastodon.org API, Mastodon has about 930k MAU, down from 970-980k MAU a month ago. (active_user_count in the API corresponds to MAU – however that's defined – as you can see from this page.)

[surfdude29]

There's one or two groups of people that are making AT Protocol-specific platforms.

FYI @venteto Waverly is one of them:

Waverly: a community platform built on Bluesky

And see also:

Reddit alternative on ATProto

[skeddles]

aged like milk