The day isn't even over yet Bluesky has already seen its biggest influx of new users in a single-day

Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.

Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform’s entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.

The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website “Bluesky Stats.” Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.

It’s impossible to know whether Musk’s comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.

    • UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN@lemmy.worldEnglish
      252·
      2 years ago

      Hard to convince people. The twittersphere has fractured into about 4 different places, and masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.

      • uis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        133·
        2 years ago

        masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.

        And? Servers are inter-operable.

        • IMALlama@lemmy.worldEnglish
          231·
          2 years ago

          Until your home instance defederates from another instance. Sure, you can always make another account, but your average user wants a lower friction experience.

          I’m reasonably active in the fediverse, but I recognize that the more explaining it takes to the average user the less likely they’re going to want to join in.

          The old old top gear cool wall tried to hit on this concept. You could have a very technically excellent car classified as uncool because if you had to explain why it was cool to a normie you had already lost them.

          It will be hard for the fediverse to get over this hump, which is probably why you see so many Linux users here and so few say woodworkers or other (somewhat) more niche communities.

          • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
            11·
            2 years ago

            Most average people would never notice defederation unless you told them. It’s pretty frictionless and drama free.

            The niche communities are always the last to come. It’s why they’re niche. That techie people are the first is nothing damming. It’s always been that way for every service.

      • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        Honestly I think Mastodon needs a third party app that makes it feel more like Twitter, similar to how reddit apps are switching to lemmy. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there were any third party Twitter apps that had the name recognition of the reddit ones.

        • geosoco@kbin.socialOP
          3·
          2 years ago

          THere were a few but they got bought (eg. tweetdeck).

          There are also 3rd party apps for mastodon that a lot of people like, and they try. But for many people, mimicking the parts of Twitter they value is difficult to do without proper backend support for supporting algorithms, and even then the way activitypub works it still makes it difficult to support for most developers.

          Two of the key features are discovering new or related content, which is hard to do in mastodon as it needs to calculate similarity across all of the profiles and their content in order to make recommendations – or collect data like your cell contacts to help you connect with people you already know. Most people don’t want contact sharing, and indexing all of the recommended profiles, especially across federated servers is challenging.

          The second is engagement based recommendations. Many social media users aren’t incredibly active. They want to open the app in specific moments to quickly catch up with everything since they last opened the app. To do this well, you need to know what they’ve engaged with and look back at content since they last logged on and rank it based on that. People may follow 1000 people, but really care about maybe 30-40 accounts the most. Friends, family, specific journalists or famous people. Mastodon just gives you like a sample of the last 50 or so items. If you follow anyone super active, you may just get a lot of noise in those updates.

          Obviously, there are times when everyone wants a linear timeline, but it depends upon their daily use.

    • PaulHulford@lemmy.worldEnglish
      48·
      2 years ago

      Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.

      • PlasterAnalyst@kbin.social
        42·
        2 years ago

        Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.

        • kescusay@lemmy.worldEnglish
          17·
          2 years ago

          I’m still salty about that. Google+ was fantastic on release. Simple, clean, elegant, and fast. Then they steadily, systematically fucked it up. By the time it was cancelled, it had become unusable.

      • Tylerdurdon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        2 years ago

        So, in the shape of a pyramid? Sounds like a good business model. I wonder if anyone has ever done that before? (yes, it’s a joke)

    • Clent@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      Yes but I’m sure many recorded invites and didn’t bother. Musk musking TSFKAT ( the-site-formerly-known-as-twitter) was the needed motivation to accept it.

    • nucleative@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Invite only is a fascinating choice for a social network that requires network effect to succeed.

      Gmail is the most famous/successful example but interesting to note that email is a federated network that can interoperate with every other email address too.

      What about this bluesky network?

  • uis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    60·
    2 years ago

    This is a problem. Bluesky is privately-owned and will do same shit.

    Here are some explainations. And more.

    • mr_tyler_durden@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      2 years ago

      It’s Jack Dorsey’s “Twitter but federated this time”, except there is only 1 instance, run by Jack…. But don’t worry, “Trust me bro” it will totally be federated/open.

      Maybe it will be but until it is it’s just as bad as Twitter.

  • WorldWideLem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    2 years ago

    I was interested in it but at the end of the day Dorsey got Twitter into its initially mediocre state, and he’s endorsed RFK Jr. as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter. So should I really expect it to be any better? I’ll keep an eye on it but my expectations aren’t terribly high.

    • Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
      282·
      2 years ago

      and he’s endorsed RFK Jr.

      Gross. Yeah Dorsey sucks generally.

      as well as Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

      But I don’t hold this part against him. If some moron came along and offered to drastically overpay for my house, for example, I’d endorse the fuck out of that even if he’s a shitheel.

    • Cyberflunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      I signed up just to see the hype, and it’s the same boring Twitter, with less commitment. People just grabbing namespace.

  • dangblingus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    2 years ago

    People are so desperate for anything RESEMBLING twitter, that they’ll sign up for a trash service like BS.

    Mastodon undoubtedly has more brand recognition at this point.

  • Smacks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    2 years ago

    God I hope he gets gaslit into actually making Twitter a subscription. It would be so funny

  • Zoness@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    I want to like it but they refuse to open up the platform still after Twitter keeps handing them opportunity after opportunity and I’m afraid their chances to succeed are going to wane.

    • UnD3Rgr0uNDCL0wN@lemmy.worldEnglish
      92·
      2 years ago

      Twitter has been dead for over a year. Well before threads. It started with the shadowbans and the tweaking of the algorithms to push media down our throats when all we wanted was cat photos and to talk about music.