The platform crossed the milestone last night, and it happened about a month and a half after the 25 million mark. Bluesky still has a long way to go to pass Threads, though; Meta’s platform has more than 100 million daily active users.
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3lgu4lg6j2k2v]
To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.
It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.
They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).
This is such a half-assed dog and pony show.
They have millions in investment, why do they need someone else to fund this? Why don’t the bluesky team directly and materially support them?
This is a core aspect of Bluesky’s marketing and they asking other volunteers to help make them rich.
Until there’s overt advertising its unlikely to enshittify the normal way. That doesn’t mean it won’t, just that a different capital process is at work. Wikipedia has outlived most of “web2.0” because its funded by donations and run by volunteers.
Trust me we will be deep into that territory so fast it is going to make your head spin.
Private equity and VC funding can’t directly buy Wikipedia and dissect it because it is an at least somewhat functional non-profit organization. That is the only reason.
What would a comparable example be?
Twitter
deleted by creator
Twitter was ad driven and was enshittifying before musk bought it, and sold because they were a public company.
Jay Graber will likely get bored and sell it off or monetize eventually but twitter is definitely not the model here.
The only thing the Fediverse is missing is way to migrate from 1 instance to another
It actually does exist, at least on Mastodon, but is still very janky (e.g. old posts aren’t moved over due to “technical limitations”)
Automatically makes people unfollow your old account and re-follow your new account, then makes your old instance’s link redirect to your new instance’s one.
Ah yes, “free our feeds” where millionaire VCs are asking for donations