I recently finished the episode of The Verge’s podcast #Decoder with the interview to Bluesky’s CEO and it seems a quite interesting project. At the beginning I wasn’t looking really into it because of their choice of using a new protocol instead of the existing ActivityPub, but after listening to her and the reasons behind this choice maybe I’ll give them a chance.
What do you think? Do you use it alongside with the fediverse?
It has some nice ideas, particularly for moderation. I like that they’re thinking hard about these things.
I think its moving too slowly and it’s lack of momentum at the time of the Twitter exodus was lost. Its too late for it to become an alternative to the likes of Twitter, Mastodon etc. and I think it will die.
I hope that once it’s gone it will leave a legacy of those good ideas I mentioned above which other platforms will take learnings from.
All my opinion.
Generally I agree on the loss of momentum. I’m in there and have said the same there.
That being said, comparing it to mastodon in terms of size at the moment doesn’t make sense. The current metric indicate the BlueSky user base is likely bigger than mastodon’s. Not by much and certainly, just like mastodon, no where close to competing with Twitter and threads (if that’s the goal).
But it seems to have a user base roughly on the same scale as the fediverse. Which is something given how slow and behind they are.
Big question is how viable a small user base is for their company behind it and whether the structure of their system is something a community organisation could keep afloat.
I wasn’t doing that. I was really talking about where the Twitter exodus went. I’ve said before, my opinion is that those that have left Twitter are gone and those that want to stay are not going anywhere. From what I’ve seen of Bluesky is that much of that exodus hasn’t gone there, or have stayed if they did. Bluesky feels very empty.
So what I was really saying is that they haven’t capitalised on that exodus and I think they are too slow and too late to be able to do that now.
I think they is a really good question. And it’s something that confuses me (but I don’t know much about their financial situation). They are moving slow which isn’t ‘normal’ for a company. We’re used to them moving quickly, gaining market share and a user base and monetising it. So, assuming they are not going this out of the goodness of their hearts, what’s the end game?
Right, that makes sense. From my impression they’ve garnered an off-Twitter crowd of some sort, but probably smaller than masto. Their active user count (which can underestimate total activity) is on track to be about the same or bigger than masto’s, so there’s that.
And yea, the company clearly has some aim of playing a long game, with a small team. So it’s a bit weird. It’s also a bit weird how their product is more of a platform than an app, which requires third party devs to build on it for it to be attractive. All of which, IMO, is interesting enough to be worthwhile.
But yea, as you say, alternative social media momentum has likely dried up. I’ve said the same else where. So it’s hard to imagine what happens to anything that struggles to keep the lights on.