Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
I’m sad that a lot of people couldn’t perceive the mastodon in the room.
Mastodon’s original app is just trash Threads are completely unreadable, it should be like that of X
The thing that goes against what most people are used to is the fact that most fediverse services either don’t have an official app or the official app is just a proof of concept. You’re kind of expected to use either the website directly or third party apps, which are usually much better.
When I still used my Mastodon account I used Megalodon and was testing Moshidon as well. Now I just use the PWA for the Sharkey instance I’m on.
Which instance are you on?
Sakurajima. They have a Mastodon instance too.
Very japan focused. Be warned if you’re not some kind of weeb.
Wait people didn’t join Mastodon as well? Just Bluesky?
That’s actually a good question. Surely Mastodon and Lemmy instances should have also seen an uptick in registrations?
They did, but it’s nothing huge.
I saw some posts on Mastodon yesterday celebrating an influx of Brazilian signups, but it was pretty modest compared to the massive exodus to Bluesky. Which, honestly, seems about right and proportionate. (I love Mastodon, but it doesn’t feel like a 1:1 replacement for Twitter the way Bluesky does.)
Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word “cis” and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.
Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm “to suggest the users whatever they interested in”, less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.
normies are allergic to anything other than corporate social media and software
What are blueskys current userbase numbers, mastodons current userbase numbers, and are they federated with each other?
are they federated with each other?
no. there’s a sort of a third party bridge, but it requires an account on one platform to follow a bot in order to show up on another, so if someone on Bluesky doesn’t explicitly do it and you’re using Mastodon, then you’re not going to connect.
They do not federate with each other AFAIK, Mastodon’s user base is in another user’s answer, Bluesky’s IDK except apparently one million more than before
Bluesky: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats Mastodon: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon
There isn’t a 1:1 comparison. But the closest comparison looks like Mastodon is on a bit of a decline at 800k MAU. Bluesky is roughly 400k daily likers.
Two competing federation standards. The VHS and Betamax, or Blu Ray and HD-DVD, of 2024.
that’s for fediverse. not bluesky
They asked about Mastodon…
That does not seem to know about Bluesky
It does, however, know about Mastodon.
Right, because FediDB tracks activitypub, which bluesky is not built upon.
…right but, as I said, Mastodon is. Which is what they asked about…
is your reading comprehension seriously that poor?
Is there a point you’d like to make or are you just here for the personal insults?
Oh, right. I guess I forgot all the individual questions. My bad.
Sure, but dari does not address 2/3rds of their answer. Just posting a link makes it seem like it does. You could’ve added that it only addresses Mastodon’s user base from their answer and not Bluesky’s nor wether they can communicate.
Dude, grow up.
Yep, I saw them coming in. Works well enough for me… Brazilians make the best Sega Genesis games!
Brazilians make the best programming languages
Lua and Elixir 😙👌
Lua’s origins are from Brazil? Bro so many mods on PC use LUA it’s insane.
Yup, created at Pontifica Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ, a catholic university), originally for Petrobras’ systems in the early 90s.
I know World of Warcraft’s UI and lots of logic runs on lua, also that a good portion of roblox logic can be made in lua instead of C++. Being super light (247kb was small even by 1993 standards) and easy to embed helped it a lot, for sure.
Well not anymore thanks to cartridge sellers.
Can someone explain to me the difference between bluesky and twitter?
Bluesky is built on an open source ActivityPub alternative called “AT Protocol”. However, Bluesky itself is not open source and afaik does not yet federate with any other software. The company is a “public benefit corporation”.
From my understanding, Bluesky has good moderation, to the point where Jack Dorsey (the Twitter founder) condemned it and withdrew from the project. That’s a big plus in my book.
Bluesky itself is not open source
Am I missing something? https://github.com/bluesky-social
As far as I understand, the protocol and client apps are completely open souce. I do not believe the Bluesky software is open source, so you could not host an instance the same way you would with Mastodon. I could be missing something or not underatanding, but that’s what it seems to me.
Wait, Dorsey left? That might actually make it interesting
Yep, and he soon after started praising musk and Twitter, calling it “freedom software” lol. Him leaving was what drew my attention, I like the way it’s heading so far.
Bluesky has opt-in federation with the fediverse: https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/05/bluesky-and-mastodon-users-can-now-talk-to-each-other-with-bridgy-fed/
It’s a third-party project, not an opt-in feature of Bluesky.
The latter has been taken over by ElMu and his shenanigans, the former was originally a Twitter-internal project for a decentralised social media interfacing protocol, got forked out from Twitter in 2021 (the year before Musk took over Twitter), has a lot of Ex-Twitter people on it and promises to do a lot of things a lot better than either Twitter (now X) and offer a little more resilience against things like moderator abuse.
Curiously, that last bit is the first time I’ve seen a reasonable use case for Blockchain: Your content can be stored on arbitrary servers and migrated to others. Your identity is tied to keys that can be used to verify your content is actually yours. The info where the public half of the key and all your content are stored is recorded in a public, distributed, append-only ledger, where each entry verifies the integrity of the previous one. Thus, once you’re registered on that, no single moderator can arbitrarily ban you anymore. (Pretty sure there’s a hole in that logic, but I’m not versed enough to confidently assert as much.)
Of course, there’s a caveat: To discover content, you need an index (“relay”) of all the content feeds. That takes some of the content aggregation load off your individual content servers and makes hosting them easier. However, it shifts the content moderation / federation power from the individual instances to the shared index: If a given index blocks your content, people using it won’t see your content.
In theory anyone can host their own relay and everyone can choose which relay they want their content feed to use. In practice, hosting a relay is resource-intensive, bsky have a solid headstart and probably more resources, and their app also obviously uses their own index by default, so if you do want to create a “competitor”/alternative index, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. They even state that expectation: “In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers” src
Which is basically a small-scale version of Google and Bing (and the AT Protocol Overview explicitly uses that comparison): Sure, you can make your own search engine, but if Google is the default everywhere, has a lot of storage and computing power to serve more requests and has way more indexed content, why would people use yours instead? Thus, if you want your content to be seen by many people, you have to play by the big relays’ rules.
Much decentral. Very open.
(I’m being snarky here, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt: They probably do mean to make self-hosting your personal data and content easier, and it’s easier for custom feeds to use single, big relays to draw from rather than doing the indexing and collation themselves. However, it provides them with a lot of leverage and just because they call themselves a “public benefit corporation” doesn’t mean I trust them not to start enshittifying for profit at some point.)
One is going down the drain first
Unfortunately dark money from Russia is keeping it afloat to provide misinformation for the United States election
Ooookkay,
what
I heard Brazil did not ban twitter for good reasons, it can be to block a passage of speech.
You heard it wrong, we are punishing the ones that did our January 6th and said nazis should have a party to vote, Musk refused, wtf should a country do then?
‘speech’ is just what modern king wannabes use to claim they are above anyone else, including a sovereign state’s laws. People like Elon, Trump, Putin all want to be above any law or form of responsibility.
Wrong.
900k of them are bots getting ready.
Such gross weirdo-behavior to call 900k completely normal people looking to socialize online bots, get off your high horse
I am fine with this.
Blue Sky is the only one that allows porn and has no defederation drama, so I’m not surprised people went there. Instagram even put a banner telling people to try out threads but who would trust Zuck?
Twitter allows porn now, no?
Yes, and that’s why it’s hard for artists and their fans to leave, a social media that allows that and normal people posts together has massive visibility compared to enthusiasts site.
I can’t help but pronounce it like a Slavic surname.
Bluesky has gained a
millionbrazilion new users…I’m so sorry, it was right there. And yay for Bluesky!
As a brazilian, I’m now deeply offended that the ISO does not recognize brazilion as a valid amount
Downloaded it. Signed up. Replied to a post about rechargeable batteries. Account got restricted. Left.
Didn’t India just ban Twitter or something?
Edit: It was Brazil.
BJP would never as they’re fascists themselves.
Wow. Good for Bluesky.
Non-twitter is fine in any form. Real progress is gonna be going to Mastodon, although that’s hamstrung by user-unfriendliness.
While I agree with you. I don’t think it’s user unfriendly I think of it as a normie blocker. That being said, bluesky is owning class social media, I expect the enshittification to start now that they have a million + users.
“Normie blocker” is just how abnormies rationalize bad design
Seriously yea. Same reason Linux user experience is generally bad. Unfortunately engineers usually make for poor designers.
Except it’s not. It’s real easy to learn you can choose any instance you’re welcome to. Normies are the ones choosing not to learn.
I do feel sorry for them because they’re probably going to get pushed to the next billionaires social media in the next decade to be exploited there too.
Unless I’m completely missing something? What’s so bad about the design? I’m pretty dumb and uneducated and I dig me some federated social media purely because it’s genuine compared to the owning class social media.
I’m pretty dumb and uneducated
Statistically speaking, the mere fact that you are here indicates that you are among the top percentages of tech literal people. This isn’t necessarily about intelligence or general education, but about tech literacy.
Brah, I’m not a normie. That’s why we’re talking on Lemmy.
That’s… exactly what I’m saying. Did you misunderstand my comment perhaps? Normies are not “choosing” not to learn, they just literally don’t have the tech literacy skills to easily participate in the fediverse. The fediverse should improve its UX to allow more people to participate.
Sadly literate and tech literate don’t always go hand in hand.
Personally I wish there was a better way to link multiple accounts together to say they’re the same person. When I switched to hosting my own instance, I basically just abandoned my old account, but I would have loved to link them to have the history there.
We have the technology, it could be as simple as SSH keys, or like how bitcoin wallets are unique and don’t require internet to verify a match.Edit: I actually just discovered that this is one of the main feature differences between ActivityPub and BlueSky’s AT Protocol. BlueSky has “account portability”, and now that you can self-host it, I’m seriously considering setting it up. It would be really nice if we get an update that lets the protocols federate with each other. I think that BlueSky has said they intend to support ActivityPub federation in the future.
ActivityPub actually has a similar mechanism of a “Move” activity. There are just very few implementations that support that kind of thing.
The main problem with that seems to be that the original server needs to be active to migrate. If the instance I’m on shuts down or is uncooperative, then my account history is gone. And for Mastodon, that’s even worse if you have a bunch of followers. These are all reasons I decided to self-host before I built up too much of a presence.
Right, of course. I don’t really see any way any protocol can get around that though. If the original server is suddenly just gone, there is no way to tell it to move your account elsewhere. Hopefully such a situation should happen very rarely though.
Mastadon has definitely improved it’s user onboarding process. When I first tried, and failed, to use it 3 years ago it was awful. Signing up a year ago was a painless process. It may not be fully ready for the mainstream just yet, but it’s definitely getting there.
user-unfriendliness.
I can’t really disagree with this, since I’ve personally seen folks make a casual attempt and bounce off Mastodon, and it comes up enough online that it feels like it has to be true, but at the same time I’ve got this reflexive skepticism since I’m an absolute idiot and managed to figure out how to have a good time on Mastodon and really enjoy it. (I signed up in the spring of 2023, though, so can’t speak to earlier times.) I think I’m probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person. So I really wonder what it is specifically that frustrates folks enough to just give up on Mastodon when I, an amiable doofus of the highest order, love it so much.
I have additional Thoughts on cultural issues that might disappoint people who were expecting Mastodon to replicate whatever specific era of pre-Musk Twitter they yearn for, but it can’t *just *be that. There has to be some technical barrier a lot of folks are stumbling over, right?
I have a potentially really dumb question: how is mastodon different from the assorted lemmys and such? I originally thought mastodon was just another fediverse instance but now that I think about it I don’t think I’ve seen posts and content from others on a mastodon instance, either on .world or where I am now at .ee. is this just due to defederation with mastodon or is mastodon different in some way that I am missing?
Mastodon works more like twitter, several microblog posts that you only see if you search or check:
- Latest posts of an instance;
- The profile of the person posting;
- Posts with certain hashtags;
- Posts of people you chose to follow;
Meanwhile, lemmy works more like reddit, easier to find “specific content”, with posts neatly separated by community/instance and easier to find/search/interact with in the future. It’s less about individuals and more about communities
I think mastodon only interacts with lemmy as comments on existing posts, though there’s probably a way to post to a community from a mastodon client/site
I never used twitter anyway so idk I never got into Mastodon. Didn’t help that the few people I thought to follow basically pulled the “yeah this is cool #fucktwitter buuuuuut everyone is still on Twitter okbaiiiiiii”
I think I’m probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person.
Just from the fact that you are here, it is statistically likely that you are much closer to the tech literates than the normies. Can you search for a specific email in your email inbox? You’re already way ahead of many people. You are severely overestimating the technical literacy of normal people.
In reality, mastodon doesn’t achieve the same dopamine hit by design. This is both a good thing (less addictive, more conversational) and a bad thing (less retention, more opaqueness in statistics) depending on why you want to use or don’t want to use social networks.
Non-twitter is fine in any form.
Gotta disagree with you there when it comes to Threads. We have seen how Meta is also trying to influence global politics. Threads should not be encouraged either. On top of that, their privacy policy is a nightmare.
https://qz.com/threads-meta-delayed-launch-eu-privacy-policy-concerns-1850609340
inb4 in 8 years time “Greensky a.k.a. Trust Me Guys This is THE New Twitter Forever” gains a million new users in the last 3 days.
