Bluesky has added another million users this week, bringing the total to over 4 million. By comparison, the ActivityPub-based fediverse has about 10 million users according to FediDB. The situation will change when Threads is added, but if Bluesky keeps growing it’s worth asking how they’ve done it.
@manton in my experience, it's not much more complicated than "it's easier, more attractive, and more fun". Those aren't the only things that matter, but they do matter to millions.
@manton From where I stand, three things come to mind: (a) They created scarcity with that invite-code mess. That made the platform utterly attractive to many, as I had to learn - apparently this is more interesting than a system where you just sign up for any particular server and get going. (b) They seem focussed on replacing Twitter first and foremost quickly in many possible ways. Including the fact it's just one server which eliminates quite a bunch of issues that are ... extremely annoying on the ActivityPub based Fediverse (like lack of discoverability of users and content, incomplete threads and federation issues of all sorts, ...). And, hate to admit, yet (c): A lot of my old Twitter contacts, after spending a few weeks there, have been driven off Mastodon/Fediverse again due to an at times somewhat annoying reply-guy culture. Once you gain some visibility and/or dare to touch topics that are somehow "controversial" on your instance, it quickly can get ... messy and annoying over there. Seen a longer thread of a German journalist who posted a picture of himself entering a Zoom conference and that ended up in a really really "interesting kind of argument. 🙈 And, maybe another general issue which makes these hard to compare: Bluesky, again, is a larger VC-backed structure. They do have money for developers, operations and public relations / marketing. On the Fediverse side, Mastodon seems the only structure that is sort of an organization, and still I guess it's nowhere near what Bluesky PBLLC is as a "company".
@z428 For your (c), I agree although I think that hurts monthly active users more than initial sign-ups. Of course, it's not just one thing and a lot of factors contribute.
@anildash Yeah. Mastodon has improved the sign-up process by pointing folks to mastodon.social, but Bluesky is still easier to sign up and discover users. I'm fascinated by the "more fun" too... My Bluesky timeline definitely leans more toward playful, lighthearted.
@manton @anildash I'd very much like us to find a better way to re-connect your social network. I think if the Mastodon app used a privacy-preserving way to check your mobile contacts and see where they are on the fediverse, we'd have a lot better stickiness here. Global people search would also help a lot.
@manton what do you mean how they've done it? People have missed twitter since elon took over. Bsky is almost identical. Where's the confusion
@manton Valid point, yes. Still sort of accepted it will need both and hoping for micro.blog to maybe expose full-length posts to ActivityPub and include Mastodon/Bluesky responses at some point to ease that a bit.
I've really been enjoying using Street Pass, which is obviously not a useful thing for a new user, but serves a kind of different interest point. When I'm casually going along my web browsing, I can find out whether or not a page I visited has an associated Mastodon user to connect with.
