this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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To quote Life of Brian,
Splitters!
...assuming of course these are people who left the open Fediverse to join another corporate platform.
More likely twitter users.
And yes it’s corporate which is less good than mastodon.
But it is add-free, has a working algorithm, is feature rich, is open-source, lets you self-host etc. Full defederation is coming soon too.
Having used both bluesky (self hosted) and mastodon. The experience is simply far better on bluesky.
Unlike lemmy vs reddit. Where (except for active user count) there isn’t really a tradeoff. Lemmy is simply far better.
I think the true genius of Bluesky is that it doesn't have A algorithm, it has a framework that allows users to build their own algorithms, share them with others, and subscribe to the algorithms from people whose tastes you trust. They did the same thing with moderation making it possible to build your own moderation tools, share them, and use those constructed by others you trust.
It'll be abused by the trolls who love the sound of their own voice and embrace the echo chamber of their choosing, but the flip side is that none of the rest of us have to suffer those idiots if we don't want to. It's not a perfect solution to the Paradox of Tolerance, but it's good enough.
There was lot of people recommending BlueSky over Fediverse, when the big hype happened. The biggest problem to me is, that this split up the user base considerably. Which in turn weakened its potential for both platforms to overtake Twitter.
Just under us: If you want so, we took Twitter over. It's renamed to X. :-p ..., nah, just joking, it's still Twitter.
I mean thanks to bridgy you can communicate across blusky and mastodon. For example people can follow my mastodon account on bluesky.
And bluesky has gained > 8 million users in the past couple months. Mastodon has 900 odd thousand MAU.
So clearly the majority have gone to one.
I don't know where you got that number from, but at least these statistics say Mastodon got 9 million users (but not all are active off course, same should be true for BlueSky): https://mastodon-analytics.com/ And this account claims 15 million: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount and a Wikipedia article says "On 19 March 2023, Mastodon passed the ten million mark for registered user accounts": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)#2022_Twitter-related_spikes_in_adoption
Now, I do not claim these numbers to be correct. But compared to your estimation its vastly different.
Edit: Just for context of my reply, as you edited yours. You said you don't believe Mastodon would even have 100 thousand users.
Even if your numbers are true. Mastodon has existed for 7 years. Bluesky for less than one.
So logically the precentage of users to active users should be much higher on Bluesky.
Also number of accounts is possibly a bad metric to judge mastodon because of the federation.
For example, I have 8 mastodon accounts (tried a couple different instances and programmed a couple rss bots to give me a news feed).
That doesn't matter, because most users just came in the last year. Just shortly after Mastodon begun to explode in 2023 from 2 million to over 10 (and now seemingly over 15 million) registrations, Bluesky came in. So the 7 years comparison doesn't matter here.
Probably, but without statistics its just our gut feeling. And as you saw a few minutes ago, your gut feeling can be drastically wrong. My point was not here to race count Mastodon vs Bluesky, but to point your estimation of Mastodon accounts being vastly underestimated.
According to Wikipedia Bluesky has 10 million users and 5 million monthly active: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky That would be about what Mastodon has, if we believe those numbers. My point is, you totally over estimate Bluesky and underestimate Mastodon. The exact numbers does not matter here, what matters is my point that the user base is split into these two worlds.
So bluesky has 5 million monthly active users while mastodon has 1 million?
Thats a fivefold difference.
I was just correcting your initial 100k estimation of Mastodon accounts. That's all. No need to get cocky.
Sorry I didn’t mean to sound cocky. It sounds like a byproduct of slow federation. As I edited my comment almost immediately (before you replied) after posting it, to correct said number and provide a source, but it doesn’t look like it got to your end.
Also MAU stands for monthly active users and not total users. But I realise that acronym may not be widespread.
Comparing users to MAU seems disingenuous. The fediverse has ~12 million users, according to fedidb and around 1.1 million active ones.
Most of them on Mastodon.
True. So both have around 10 million total users. Bluesky has no monthly active user statistic. But around 1 million daily posters according to this https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
While Mastodon has ~1 million monthly active users.
So sounds like bluesky’s got a lot more activity with that many daily posters, as of now, anyways.
It requires to use a separate app like this which is not very convenient.
A very healthy chunk is from Brazil, twitter got banned there due to musk being a stubborn child that doesn't follow the law
At least Bluesky is decentralized and Open Source, isn't it? While this is a conceptual step down from Fediverse, it's still better than all the other alternatives in use. I don't know how much the Bluesky company controls the entire platform, if its even possible.
It's technically decentralized, but functionally this doesn't mean anything (yet) except for them not having to care about moderation.
It seems part of it might be open source, like the AT protocol, but not sure about all of it.
It's centralized and for-profit. They will have to do ads eventually or shut down.
I don’t think we ever had 8 million people.
More like bots, really. Threads had a huge user influx but also a ton of inorganic activity.