Bluesky now has 30 million users
191 comments
·February 3, 2025bloopernova
glimshe
I use both of them. My experience is that they are sort of mirror images on opposing ends of the political spectrum. I don't want to see politics at all, so for now Bluesky is inferior because it has way fewer people in my interest areas.
stiltzkin
[dead]
anal_reactor
1. The quality of pictures is lower than on Twitter, which I was using mostly for porn
2. Blocking someone prevents that person from even seeing your posts, which means that from the perspective of a lurker, it's best not to follow anyone, not to engage with anyone at all, not to make anyone aware of your existence, because 1% of people you follow will block you just because they're having a bad day
3. The Python client makes baby Jesus cry
DrBenCarson
1. Sorry for you
2. Don’t almost all blocks behave that way? Twitter’s always did. Seems Elon, in his infinite social acuity, has confused “block” with “mute?” Vast majority of users want to be able to actually “block” people
3. Baby Jesus cries very easily, he’s a baby
anal_reactor
> Don’t almost all blocks behave that way?
No
> Baby Jesus cries very easily, he’s a baby
I've never seen official baby Jesus merch with him crying
fatata123
[dead]
AdmiralAsshat
And with that, I think the door on Mastodon gaining widespread adoption is closed forever.
We had a very brief window when the Twitter Exodus was happening and non-techies were giving Mastodon a try. But it wasn't good enough, as far as giving the Twitter refugees what they wanted to see, and so they simply moved on to the nearest Twitter-With-The-Numbers-Filed-Off platform and stayed there instead.
There's probably a good post-mortem study someone could do on this (someone more tuned in than me, since I never had a Twitter account to begin with), and the larger ramifications for why many of the FLOSS platforms fail to gain the adoption they think they will when the flagship proprietary platform becomes intolerable. cf: the failure of Windows 11 refugees to move to Linux, Chrome refugees to move to Firefox, etc.
buyucu
I tried Mastodon twice, and got banned in both occasions for saying things mildly critical of Israel and Ukraine.
Mastodon's biggest problem is the hyper-aggressive content moderation on the larger instances. Speaking about Mastodon's tech and UI, it's vastly superior to Bluesky. But they drive people away and then complain that people don't come.
josephb
The fediverse can be quite an echo chamber.
kavenkanum
But to be honest the UX of Mastodon is just unusable. Following someone is not a click on Follow button. It's the most basic feature I can think of. And it's complicated there. It just couldn't work. Bluesky just did it better.
Corrado
I agree that the UX of Mastodon was not the best. I tried several times to use it and it just never "clicked". Bluesky just worked for me, almost without trying.
Maybe my problem with Mastodon was choosing the server to join. My brain knows that it's federated and it really doesn't matter which server you choose. However it always felt like I was choosing the wrong server somehow. Just that little bit of friction was enough to drive me away.
stiltzkin
[dead]
archagon
Most tech discussion I follow is still on Mastodon. And when Bluesky inevitably goes the way of Twitter due to VC toxicity, Mastodon will still be standing.
rsynnott
> And with that, I think the door on Mastodon gaining widespread adoption is closed forever.
Probably not _forever_; Bluesky is, at least for now, centralised enough that if Bluesky-the-entity screws up sufficiently badly, well, where else are people going to go?
But, honestly, Mastodon as _mainstream_ was always a long-shot. UX matters, and while Mastodon's is _fine_ once you're used to it, it's quite hostile to new users. Bluesky had the advantage that people already knew how to use it, because it's basically the same UX as Twitter.
homebrewer
You would think people would learn from their mistakes and not move onto another centralized platform backed by VC money, but here we are.
lkrubner
If people cared about decentralization then we would not have seen the consolidation that we've seen. That's true even for technologies who pitch decentralization as a core feature, as we saw with cryptocurrencies -- the original argument was that cryptocurrencies allowed a decentralization of finance, but then we saw a handful of platforms centralize the trades, and most people who bought cryptocurrencies were pleased to have this convenience.
From moxie.org:
"Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan."
They also make this point:
"I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway."
For a variety of reasons, people have not felt that it is worthwhile to fight for decentralization.
speedgoose
People don’t really care about decentralisation.
Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.
oneeyedpigeon
And it didn't involve a really confusing question as a barrier to entry.
Krssst
Bluesky asks about which server to use on registration like mastodon.social does. For me the difference seems to be better marketing for Bluesky which makes people want to deal with the change and somewhat enjoy it rather than see every obstacle as a pain.
Bluesky does have some advantages like starter packs (and network effect now that it has so many accounts).
rvz
> Bluesky arrived at the right time, unlike Mastodon.
In fact Mastodon had a better chance than BlueSky ever had, but had a significantly worse onboarding experience.
Mastodon was there at the right time, (Nov 2022) but was extremely unprepared to onboard millions of users simultaneously and more people were left confused on how to use the platform or even how to create an account or "which instance" to sign up to.
This is the obvious reason why BlueSky succeeded and took off, as predicted. [0]
dep_b
Yep, I was at the registration screen multiple times and always left confused. I’m a user now, but it’s quite dead for me while I got featured in a few starter packs a while ago on Bluesky.
JKCalhoun
Also, onboarding.
Mastodon needs to be more streamlined.
andyjohnson0
Helped by Mastodon having truly awful branding
cmxch
They only care about their filter bubble, and BlueSky provides a guaranteed hermetic experience.
LelouBil
What put me off from mastodon is the fact that you can't migrate your account easily.
Yes, Bluesky is more centralized, but I feel like it is decentralized in the ways that matter for a Twitter/X Alternative use case :
- Self hosting of data, easy migration - Automatic verification via DNS - Custom feeds, Custom moderation, but you can still use the official ones
DocChi77
It should be noted that, at least for now, account migration can only go one way. That is, from the main Bluesky PDS to an external one. According to the documentation on account migration[0], they plan to enable incoming migrations at some point in the future, but there's no timeline.
I'm sure a big reason for this the possibility for abuse, since "migrating" an account is a different action than simply "creating" a new one
[0]: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR...
mariusor
Depending on when you tried things might be much better now. Moving accounts can be done in a couple of simple clicks. You might have issues with your history, which stays behind because cool URIs don't change.
anonzzzies
Just use all of them, don't hold yourself to one system.
bayindirh
With more places, comes more mental load and time waste. I for one use HN, Mastodon, and a single Discord server with some friends. I don't care about the rest.
Retric
We already have a wildly successful open protocol for communication, email. People also want the advantages of centralization.
nostrfanboi
Have you tried setting up and running an email server the past decade? Email is horribly centralized.
Nostr is the way. It will take time but it's sufficiently decentralized. Doesn't require DNS. Users hold their own keys. Fairly easy to run a relay. It's also a trust network, with encryption out of the box, so I think it will become a usable successor for email+GPG.
Retric
Yes.
> Email is horribly centralized
You’re seeing the downsides of decentralization not the result of centralization. There’s ~100’s of thousands of independently operated email servers, but nobody is directly forcing people to listen to everyone else. Instead they must stay reasonably open because the cloud didn’t win, work school and emails are still frequently independent.
rsynnott
> Users hold their own keys.
This is an absolute killer for mainstream adoption. Normal people _absolutely do not want to manage keys_. And will lose them. Like, see Bitcoin; relatively enthusiast user base, and still people lose keys _all the time_.
AntiqueFig
Username checks out.
oneeyedpigeon
You don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy.
Etheryte
This misses the point much like saying people should use Linux because it's open source. Open source is great, but at the end of the day, people will use software that they're both capable of using and that solves their problems. If you don't tick both of those boxes, the rest of it doesn't matter. Social media is the same, owning your data is nice, but if the barrier to both entry and maintenance is too high for a regular user, it's not going to happen.
rkangel
In theory Bluesky is not centralised. In practice there's only one company operating a relay.
The model of "identity backed by domain ownership" is a nice one, and deals with the Mastodon identity portability issue.
mariusor
It also tramples on the idea that Resources on the internet have Unique Identifiers that don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI#:~:text=A%20cool%20URI...
nspattak
half the comments so far talk about bluesky being similar to x ie private companies.
However AFAIK the use of the "AT protocol" seems to me to be a major difference https://bsky.social/about/faq.
I am really curious to know how I am wrong in that.
As a long time X user and now on bluesky i can tell that there is a huge difference in the content which makes it clear that the platform was pushing accounts with specific political views (or muting others)
taraparo
Doesn't mean anything. Facebook used to support XMPP.
nspattak
Supporting is on thing, being build on top of it is another thing. And on top of that, AFAIK on bluesky there is no "algorithm"
agumonkey
shallow knowledge on my side, but it seems that the AT proto requires some fancy relay node that, as of now, are only hosted by big corps, so no one has a a fully independent bsky instance
Pufferbo
This seems to be left out of the conversation when comparing Bluesky with the wider fediverse. The AT protocol relies on a bespoke setup and is complicated to implement. ActivityPub is comparatively simple, and can be implemented on pretty every thing with just a few endpoints.
haileyok
There is not a bespoke setup that you need to implement atproto. In fact, there are already a variety of applications making use of it (some to a higher degree than others). There are community implementations of app views, relays, PLC directories, and PDSes already in the wild, and - although I admittedly have a biased ear on the conversation - developers tend to appreciate the _lack_ of complication when implementing things.
donohoe
If ActivityPub is “simple” then that’s a recent’ish development. It used to be a mess.
I would imagine AT gets easier to use/setup given time too.
half-kh-hacker
you can run a resequencing relay good enough to feed an atproto appview pretty cheaply - it just needs to subscribe to a few thousand websocket endpoints to get a live tail of the whole network (incoming traffic is well under 50Mbps at peak in my experience)
running an archival mirroring relay is storage-intensive (on the order of tens of TB iirc?) but only serves as an optimization (you can backfill full atproto repositories straight from the relay instead of needing to reach out to the relevant data server)
jovial_cavalier
You cannot run a bluesky instance on your own. The AT protocol isn't really a protocol in the same way that matrix or mastodon is. It's just an API, you know like all platforms used to have?
pfraze
None of that is true
jovial_cavalier
Please point me to instructions on how to make my own bluesky instance that federates with the existing bluesky, and which does not rely on bluesky's authentication.
upofadown
Just creating a protocol specification does not create a standard. You need politics for that...
apichat
Can you prove to us that it is possible to interact with someone on Bluesky without being registered on Bluesky?
Threads use e ActivityPub but we know it's bullshit and that they will shut down the network as soon as possible. Bluesky is the same shit. AT protocol is just a honey pot.
LelouBil
I did not use Bluesky a lot, and just set it up to try self-hosting.
From what I know :
- Right now you can self-host your PDS (Personal Data Server) that hosts your user account basically, and all of your user content (posts, images, etc...)
- The easiest way to register is to use bluesky's frontend, and specifying your PDS address, I didn't try to self-host it too but I would assume if you self-host the bluesky web app, or just do the api calls to your PDS by hand or in another application, registration would work too.
- From what I understood, when you post, it is completely stored on your PDS, and then there are kinds of "mega nodes", (I think they are called Firehoses ?) That aggregate from a bunch of PDS, (and the official bsky.social PDS) and present it to end users. I don't think you can self-host theses just yet.
So, in the end, I think you can absolutely interact on Bluesky without being registered, by installing your own PDS and only making calls to create an account on it and post on it, without having an account elsewhere. However, the "end user" part is still closed off for now, since the Blue Sky Frontend uses *official* aggregators that could theoretically refuse your posts.
Go here for more information:
noname120
Won't your content be deprioritized if you do that though? Or won't it be further down the road? I fail to see any reason for Bluesky to be honest once the user base is big enough and people are silo'ed into it.
haileyok
My account is hosted on my own PDS that I run on my own. My public repo can be viewed here https://pdsls.dev/at/did:plc:oisofpd7lj26yvgiivf3lxsi, and you can see the requests being made directly to that PDS. The account is also viewable of course on the Bluesky app, https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at.
navigate8310
AT Proto is heavily developed by BS and BS is itself the major consumer of AT Proto.
kace91
Has anyone managed to get a "functioning" tech discussion feed on bluesky?
I tried not long ago, mostly help me get acquaintanced with the ruby ecosystem and news, but even using starter packs and the like the best I got was following devs that mostly talked about non tech stuff (personal life, politics and the like).
Particularly annoying was the constant "we hate twitter" posts (I know, I'm here now, so why are we talking about them?). Also tons of anti AI clickbait.
kubav027
My experience was the same but I wanted to get rust news. In my opinion social networks are failed concept because they want you to have one account for everything. They should encourage people to have multiple accounts for different audience. It is normal to talk about different things with friends, colleagues, family etc.
cheeseface
I follow people mostly from the JS/TS web development community and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between. I mostly the "mutuals" and "popular with friends" tabs to check things out.
Every now and then there's too much US politics, but it's hard to escape nowadays.
kace91
>and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between
That's mostly what I want to avoid. Not that I'm not interested in humor, but I don't really care about the personal life of some random developer in the other side of the planet.
I was just trying to get a RSS like, relatively context dense feed to substitute reddit and other similar sites. But I'm not sure it's doable in any current social network.
psionides
Not sure when that was, but there's significantly more dev stuff now since around November, e.g. the iOS devs I knew from Twitter showed up there now and are posting regularly (including dev stuff), while before last autumn it was hard to find any of them there.
fastball
That's just the state of devs these days.
bpoyner
You mean the social network that keeps showing my wife dick pics even though she turned off adult content? That social network? Pass.
SadTrombone
I haven't seen a single nude, dick or otherwise on my Bluesky feed. Perhaps your wife doth protest too much? ;)
rmsaksida
It was a few months ago, but when X was banned in my country I tried Bluesky for a while. It took a lot of effort (adding blocklists, muting words and blocking individual accounts) to cleanse the timeline of k-pop and furry content. I am not interested in either type of content and didn't follow any such accounts, but still, the "Discover" feed kept showing that stuff to me. It was the strangest onboarding experience I've ever had in social media.
dewey
The number of times I've seen straight up porn and OnlyFans content on Twitter in my feed in the recent months is 100% higher than what I've ever encountered on BS.
lsferreira42
The only way that can happen is if she follows people who post dick pics, sou you are the one who sould be concerned here!
bamboozled
I think it might be what she’s searching for or subscribed to? I’ve never seen cocks or genitals on BS but I don’t go looking for them either.
madeofpalk
...how? What feed? Is she following people who post dick pics?
Not doubting her experience, but I've never experienced this (accidentally).
llm_nerd
Some of the algorithmic feeds on Bluesky feature a non-zero number of dudes holding their dicks (posted without NSFW tagging). "What's Hot Classic" has a serious problem with this. And no, this isn't personalized at all.
https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/feed/hot-classic
That feed was defaulted for my account so for the longest time I assumed the community there was largely gay men (along with a surprising percentage of weird furry stuff). And good for them, but it just wasn't my kink to see dudes holding their dicks or sexy animal illustrations in my feed.
The discover feed seems to be absent this problem. But WHC should be either given a warning to user or at a minimum start doing some "guy holding his dick" AI inference and auto-tag those posts.
MD87
Any kind of third-party what's hot/trending feed seems to. I guess they get a lot of likes in certain circles...
e.g. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dbipwza2663x6hfp2purbn7i/fe...
obliviousgyy
That’s strange. AFAIK my wife has never had this experience with her feed. But then again she hasn’t been using it too much lately as she has been too busy going to karate competitions with her instructor, Jacques.
linuxftw
The reason Twitter was successful is they paid celebrities and corporations to join their network. That usage seems to have waned in favor of Instagram, but Twitter is still the #1 place for breaking news, especially in the sports world.
I think many people supporting bluesky assume the value is in attracting the plebeians. I don't see that being the case. There are already Facebook groups and reddit (among traditional forums) if you want to interact with your peers.
Is bluesky an alternative to twitter? In form, yes, in function, no.
Lutger
Not yet, but in the echo chamber I dwell in, a lot of orgs are joining Bluesky, and most actually left X. These are mostly journalists, scientists or people involved in politics.
At some point, it may become impossible for some of these groups - probably starting with journalists - to do their work and not be on bluesky. They will be on X and bluesky. Maybe. If it happens, then bluesky will eventually replace X. Because it will not be long before it will also be possible to leave X, probably the last to do so will also be journalists. Its more efficient that way. Then it will be just nazis and shitposters on X, and X will go the way of Digg and MySpace.
Alternatively, Twitter could also fragment completely and we'll never have an equivalent network again. There's no law stating we must have a single such network where are the celebs, news orgs and scientists hang out.
cmxch
BlueSky only will work for people that want messaging control more than discussion.
linuxftw
I suspect Twitter and Bluesky are heading to the dustbin. If each one becomes an opposing echo chamber, there are more efficient ways of distributing that kind of dialogue and content.
rsynnott
> The reason Twitter was successful is they paid celebrities and corporations to join their network.
I mean, define 'successful'. Twitter was _culturally important_ for a long time before it was a must-use by celebrities, and it's never been particularly successful in terms of reach (it has a similar MAU to Pinterest, which apparently still exists) or in financial terms.
Like, for a lot of former Twitter users, Bluesky is _already_ successful; it is an adequate replacement for old-Twitter for their needs. That's all that most people are looking for, really.
firecall
Bluesky - the Social Network where everybody posts screenshots of the awful things people post on other social networks!
pndy
Can I share my experience?
I registered bluesky account for the second time last Friday and I've pick no interests during first login. Last year I had Discovery feed filled with drawn porn despite of my settings. And now on a fresh account it's mainly American politics - while setting are more liberal regarding adult content. I followed nearly 60 people but only few of them are active. The global stream overall seems to be much "slower" than public federated one on mastodon. My partner complains he gets furry porn in Discovery while having a zero interest in that - he follows only 11 accounts.
I haven't bumped on screenshots from twitter so far.
rsynnott
> My partner complains he gets furry porn in Discovery while having a zero interest in that - he follows only 11 accounts.
AFAIK the 'Discover' algorithm is based largely on _likes_, not who you follow. This can result in extremely weird results for people who never like posts, which I suspect is quite a large part of the user base.
donohoe
Then perhaps you’re following the wrong people? I’ve not had that issue.
Lutger
I haven't seen a single such a screenshot, not one.
null
ayhanfuat
Exactly. I saw way more Elon and Trump posts on Bluesky than I saw on Twitter.
oneeyedpigeon
I saw Elon posts on my following feed (whatever X now calls it) even though I wasn't following him. I even got notifications for them! I don't really know how anyone can think that's acceptable.
askl
At least blocking him still works.
(I wish the number of users who blocked an account would show up next to the number of followers)
ritcgab
Honest question - is it from a repost from someone you follow?
robertlagrant
Is this MAU or total signups?
lkrubner
The success of Bluesky has been driven, in part, by the sophistication of their system for blocking. I know this is the main thing that draws me in. There are many people who, on a volunteer basis, build block lists that I can subscribe to. I've subscribed to many of these, more than 20, to block Nazis, scammers, MAGA, crypto bots, Russian trolls, fans of Elon Musk, racists, various political causes, and more. I've been planning to start my own list to block libertarians and anarchists. I hear other people complain about the bots on Bluesky, but I've seen very few bots on Bluesky, presumably because I subscribe to so many block lists. And I keep telling people: you can make all of the bots disappear, just subscribe to more block lists. And it's these block lists that have turned Bluesky into the most pleasant social media experience I've ever had.
cmxch
Well, people want a sealed filter bubble. And BlueSky provides that.
qwe----3
If you post about an opinion against female athletes competing against trans women will that put you on the Nazi list?
rsynnott
Nah, here: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists/a-very-british-bigotry
This one in particular is a blessing; transphobes are a particularly _tedious_ (typically just parroting whatever Rowling or similar said this week) variety of bigot, and even before Musk Twitter was swarming with them.
benob
What's the real business model behind it? Sell "custom" names? That's not going to get you very far.
psionides
They want to add some optional subscriptions in near future (a la Discord), and more long term they want to have some way of creators earning money from their followers and Bluesky getting a commission from that.
Shacklz
I wish there wasn't a need for a business-model to begin with for social media. Honestly, being business-driven is what turns them all to shit, as far as I'm concerned.
That being said, the lights need to be kept on somehow... some model similar to what Signal or wikipedia does might be a solution. Content-moderation is probably the big challenge though that they do not have to deal with to the same extent, so not quite sure how that could fly either...
apichat
Contrary to what we could thought, Bluesky doesn't asks about which server to use on registration.
It's not federate.
haileyok
There are thousands of third party PDSes on the network https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping?tab=readme-ov-f...
My experience with bsky.app is good so far. It's more like twitter was before 2015: I've had enjoyable conversations with a few different people, blocked some trolls, and discovered some new history books to read.
The XBlock Screenshot Labeler moderation service has mostly kept the reposted screenshots to a minimum. When reporting a post you can choose which service to inform, so a screenshot would get reported to XBlock rather than the bsky.app mod team. https://bsky.app/profile/xblock.aendra.dev
I assume that more moderation services will get plugged in as the site grows. It's an interesting model/protocol/service.