3 more million needed for Mastodon, Threads and Blue Sky to beat Twitter.
How many does Threads have?
So, you’re asking what the thread count is?
Threads has 275 million.
So basically … ah
Well its not organic at all. I remember it’d create a Threads account for you even if you interacted with a Threads post while logged into Instagram. Kinda shady to boast about such numbers imo.
Yeah that number has to be way bigger than the others for this reason.
BlueSky is really just Twitter pretending to be Mastodon, but that’s a minor issue compared to the problems associated with platforms like “X” and TikTok today.
What matters most right now is killing off Twitter and breaking up the dominance of any one platform on social media. I really don’t care where people go as long as they get the fuck off of Twitter and TikTok. Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion. Divide and conquer.
Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion.
No they won’t, Reddit killed Internet Forums, Threads has over 200 million active monthly users, and BlueSky already has double the number of users of Mastadon and is adding 10 new ones PER SECOND . Mastadon will be entirely irrelevant by the end of Q1 2025.
What we’re watching right now is the exact same fight that the chat platforms had back in the early 2000s. AOL chat vs IRC vs Yahoo Chat vs Microsoft Messenger. That was temporarily addressed by using multi-service clients like Trillian…and then Facebook rolled in and squashed them all. BTW there are several multi-platform clients out there right now that will allow you to interact with Xitter, Threads, BlueSky, and Mastadon simultaneously just like the Trillian of old.
I’ve been around the Internet since the BBS days and I can’t think of a single time where a de-centralized platform has out competed a centralized platform with “normal” users.
There’s a lot you aren’t taking into consideration, for example where those users are coming from.
- Threads is just Instagram, it’s essentially the same account, so its users were baked in from the start. How many of those Threads users are just people who already used Instagram?
- BlueSky really isn’t pulling users from Mastodon, it’s pulling them from “X.com”, which if nothing else represents a breaking up of old Twitter, which is good for decentralization in general. Any fracturing of social media is good for the fediverse.
- Both Threads and BlueSky are, to some degree, copies of Mastodon in terms of their relationship with federation. Threads uses ActivityPub itself (a win for the fediverse, depending on how you look at it), and BlueSky has their own AT federation protocol, which shows that the ideas behind the fediverse are already winning out. It’s entirely possible that, at some point in the future, BlueSky and Mastodon learn to speak to each other using one of those protocols (or a new one), and then the fediverse wins by default.
- Fediverse apps like Misskey are apparently doing great in Japan, which is great for the existence of Japanese artists and the international side of things.
The fact that we’re here, right now, discussing this on the fediverse, shows that ActivityPub has come a long way. Bluesky is nothing more than a shallow copy of Mastodon with far less federation and far fewer features.
Mastodon is a bit like Linux, due to its free and open nature. It can be in 3rd place for 20 years, but it’ll keep chugging along, improving and growing over time until it snowballs into something truly formidable. Linux doesn’t need to be the most popular operating system ecosystem to be great, nor does Mastodon need to be the most popular social media server. Unlike a corporate product it’s not just going to die and disappear just because it isn’t the most popular of the social media platforms.
I’ve been around the Internet since the BBS days and I can’t think of a single time where a de-centralized platform has out competed a centralized platform with “normal” users.
I’m right there with you. I’d love to see the dream of the decentralized media return, but it’s long-dead. The “Normal” user doesn’t give a fuck about the benefits and even the moderate barrier to entry over some centralized platform is enough to keep them away.
Tech-minded people seem to often forget that even the most simplistic choices like “Choose an instance” is a big deal for people. The platform that’s the most familiar, and easiest to use is going to be the one that wins, and, right now, that looks like it’s Bluesky.
It’s not even “chose an instance”. This is what my journey has been:
- Chose an instance
- Write an essay about why you wanted that one 3 never her reply, repeat 1 and 2
- Get access, then instance goes offline. Repeat 1 and 2
- Get another instance. They then bock piracy communities. Repeat 1 and 2
- Land in lemm.ee.
- Wait until I can block instances to get rid of nuances (everybody knows who I’m talking about)
Now try to get your non tech friends on board.
Bluesky doesn’t even have to be Mastodon. It just has to Twitter before it went bad.
I sincerely doubt 1 million regular people a day are leaving Twitter.
We’re watching bot accounts be created at scale in real time.
I think “leave” is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.
I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, “The creatives have moved to Bluesky.”
I’ve heard of people having similar experiences on Mastodon as well. Seems like these smaller communities of early adopters tend to simply be more active and pleasant to interact with.
I don’t think “creatives” are more active than anyone else. For the number of users, the threadiverse has a higher ratio of activity I think and it’s generally more positive here than places like reddit. Maybe it’s a similar thing. The demographic that are likely to move, are just making similar content and that makes it look more active.
IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.
Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.
I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.
You underestimate the news cycle hitting regular folk who so far didn’t know alternatives existed to twitter.
Yeah once the mainstream media started picking up Reddit stories, that’s when Reddit started going to shit.
This shows how bad threads is.
Threads is honestly terrible. There are these asinine little widgets on Instagram that show you threads that people have posted and don’t show you the full one so you click see more and it brings you to the app store. But no one really uses it much, so you see a lot of things being posted with no interaction at all
inb4 bluesky gets bought by Musk (or bezos) for a fantistillion dollars. And everyone doing a surprised pikachu face.
That is the only likely future ahead. BS is growing so fast that there’s no way they can sustain this growth even if they add ads. The only path forward is selling out. I think Microsoft might be interested in finally owning a popular social media site.
Won’t happen. Not necessarily the them not buying it part, but it staying popular at all. No site/program is too big for Microsoft to torpedo. Skype used to be the verb for voice calls before they got their hands on it.
I didn’t say MS would make it successful. They would definitely buy it, add Minecraft to it, integrate teams, then forget they bought it, neglect it, and leave it more broken than when they found it.
Bluesky have two things over Mastodon:
-Money for a big marketing campaign, and reaching famous people.
-A better first comer UX.
First one is hard to solve. But UX in Mastodon should be solved. Local and federated feeds are useless, specially on the “default” .social instance. They need to find a way for new users to be able to see a relevant feed of toots and to have an easier time finding people they’d like to interact with.
It is a solvable problem, I hope someday it could be done.
I like the idea of the local feed, especially for smaller, less generalized instances, but the default should definitely be federated and the wording could also be changed if only because the word “federated” would probably be confusing to non-technical people. Replacing it with something like “All” might be a better idea
And they’re doing this…after the election too.
Brain lapses, people.
Yeah I don’t know why it took people so fucking long to realize that being on Twitter does nothing other than help the oligarchs, but here we are…
I was never a big tweeter, but I find Bluesky to be friendlier in general, and I’m digging it :)
Now you have everyone right of center on one Platform and everyone left of center on the other. Great …
Exactly. They’re abusive assoles. Fuck them. We’re outa there.
Why do people of different political leanings need to be in the same entertainmart platform?
They’re social platforms, not entertainment, and it’s to prevent echo chambers
the right’s echo chambers (X, Truth Social) seem to have done very well for their abilities to succeed as a movement
Idk X has different problems in that area, it’s not really a place for meaningful discussion, and it’s often used by bad actors who just want to spread chaos, and with Elon at the helm I can’t see X different way of doing things anyway
it’s not a place for meaningful discussion and yet, it seems to have helped them move their project along; I’m not necessarily pushing echo chambers as a positive, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve really hurt rightists across the board in advancing their ideas
You want to prevent echo chambers? You have to stop allowing people to block others. Forcing people to see and interact with shit they don’t like prevents echo chambers. Allowing blocking just enforces echo chambers.
For the record, I’m not for disabling blocking. Algorithms are a whole other piece of that echo chamber puzzle.
The “pseudo” federated platform. If it flops they will just tell everyone “federation s*cks” but BlueSky isnt federated at all
Please don’t swear on the internet.
“Sucks” isn’t even a swearword! Are we j*st going to st*rt censoring normal w*rds now?
I think sarcasm is dead.
… and we killed him.
–Nietzsche
That’d be fuck*ng stupid.
Or perhaps fucking st*pid
H*y, fuck y*u p*l, m* k*ds ar* *n h*re.
Fuck.
Holy fuck dude censor th*t fucking shit.
My day is no longer fine
Guarantee 99% of bluesky users have no idea what federation is
Nor would they care if they knew about it.
Most internet users have no idea what it is.
Then federate it.
You are probably right here in how news agencies and other competing sites would/might phrase it if BlueSky fails.
Though what bugs me and logically does not make sense (to me) is saying federation is what caused or could cause a site or service to fail.
Its like saying my new shinny website failed because of the Internet, the Internet must then be the problem.
Yeah i have the same feeling about it, but its like that buzzword AI. If AI company fails its always the “AI” but no one understood what AI did in that project.
