Bluesky now has 30 million users.

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Bluesky has moderation lists that anyone can make and you can subscribe to them to choose what content you don’t want to see. It also gives you fine-grained control over the “default” moderation, allowing you to individually choose if you want to block nudity, threats, misinformation, spam, intolerance, etc.

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I think I might use both

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Is this 30 million accounts created? Active user numbers would be a lot more meaningful.

As an illustration, if you have a platform that’s gaining 100,000 users each month and losing 100,000 other users each month, it’s basically going nowhere. But it will eventually reach this “30 million users” milestone too if all it means is account creations.

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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).

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Yep, if even tech-savvy folks struggle with following people via links, the average user is going to feel totally lost. It's these minor UX issues that keep holding federated platforms back.

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I dont like either, but then again I couldn't get into twitter. The microblogging is not for me. I made accounts on mastodon, bluesky, pixelfed et al just to improve the numbers

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But with less people, the chance of you finding the subsets that interests you or fit your interests better is much lower, and that's one of the main issue.

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I feel like the reason the reason why it's taking off so much is because it's not federated.

It's like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it's not that simple but still.

In other words, people don't know what they actually need.

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Active user numbers is probably less than 1 million, but still, 30 million accounts created is quite likely pretty good even if most of them aren't active.

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People are not afraid of the term “Federation.“ They literally have no clue what it is.

It’s the instance concept I find consistently to be an issue.

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Im one of them

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It’s something, but there’s really no frame of reference to know if it’s good or how good. Because few companies ever report this number. Twitter might have billions of accounts created if we look at all time.

Actives are what count.

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Yeah I was confused on if it was connected, if I was explaining it to myself id say that the fediverse has interconnected forums that all serve the same content and can be accessed by making accounts on different websites or apps.

Lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected forum/threads side of the fediverse.

Mastodon, sharkey, plaroma, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected microblogging slide of the fediverse.

They all have different features, like mbin has account reputation, piefed has topics which let you sub to multiple related communities at once, etc., but the content is shared between those that serve the same type of content.

Since they're all built ontop of the same protocol ppl can always come in and build on top of it or make hybrids while still letting everyone access the same content. Like mbin having both microblogging (tweets) and threads, letting you post and view both from the same account/website.

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And it legit takes 5 minutes to sign up for 5 instances and see the differences, mine showed the same content for the most part, only lemmy.world was missing the piracy community, other than that it was all the same and any nervousness I had about it went away after seeing the feeds being the same.

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Which of those are not “advertising” of one sort or another? Twitter was a dumb idea to start and I still just don’t see any appeal.

FB had my friends (now is a stupid cesspool of echo chamber idiocy.

Insta was photo-based FB Lite.

Fark>Slashdot>Digg>Reddit>Lemmy was/is about community and sharing of ideas and thoughts. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, but the anonymity gave everyone an equal opportunity to participate.

The early days of Twitter seemed to be 10,000 people yelling in a room and nobody listening. Then celebrities took over and companies followed. Enshittifying it early on in the process.

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On Mastodon I have no trouble interacting with other users there. I have 2 accounts running on different instances - one global and one local. No trouble at all finding an account on either of them.

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I don't personally think it's because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but... everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren't averse to federation, in concept or practice.

Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter's UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.

"Bluesky" feels like a breath of fresh air, while "Mastodon" just sounds like... well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.

So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?

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Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.

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Bluesky has the network effect, at least for some domains of content. Mastodon has about 50% coverage of my domain of interests, but that's probably way less for many people.

Mastodon has the guaranteed lack of enshittification via decentralisation. Bluesky is promising it, but it seems far from guaranteed, and if it doesn't happen, I'm betting it'll enshittify about 4 times faster than twitter, because everything does these days..

So Bluesky is probably a better bet in the short term for general users.. I'm glad people are escaping twitter at least. But I'm sticking with Mastodon, 'cause fuck going through all that again in a couple of years.

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What... are you talking about?

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Bluesky now has 30 million users.