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.
Great another social media platform from the same fart huffing dumb asses that sold Twitter… it’s like people don’t learn lessons.
Americans be like “I like fascism I just don’t like THIS fascism”
FYI jack isn’t in control of the site and in fact even deleted his account after the userbase mocked him hard enough, he’s all in on nostr now
Also it has federation in testing in a sandbox environment open to external developers, it will work similarly to Mastodon in that regard
“Mr Dorsey, ypur new platform is picking up, people are starting to use it”
“… I’m bored”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to have a social platform. I just want to make them” *Starts to leave*
“Mr. dorsey? Where are you going? Jack!?”
I love that I mentioned fart huffing and you automatically assumed I meant Jack.
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isn’t bluesky invite only?
Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.
Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.
In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that’s been way more successful than G+
Gmail was also both “federated” and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn’t all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.
Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you’d get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.
And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.
“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, “WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?”. For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.
Hotmail was 2mb.
It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.
Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn’t want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I’m certain they did that for technical reasons.
It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge.
You’re right, but for those who may not know the details or the impact at the time, Google was offering 500x more storage - at the free tier - than some of the competition - hotmail - who were charging people for just 10 MB of storage. This forced hotmail to increase its free tier to 250 MB and 2 GB for customers paying $20 USD/year.
It’s hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.
My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I’m sure that part would never change.
Might Bluesky be doing the same?
Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that “exclusive” feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.
So more Gmail than G+
Yeah they’re working hard on scaling, they’ve had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now
It’s also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.
Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.
“i am the choosen one!” As if…
Boy, our servers are ducktaped!
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.
G+'s downfall was they kept it invite-only too long. Demand was there, people wanted in but Google was like, “Nah…”
By the time it was open-access, everyone had moved on or back to their old social media platforms. It could’ve been great, but Google, in typical Google fashion, got distracted by something shiny and killed it.
The sad thing is, if they’d thought even a tiny bit laterally and leveraged the fact that Google Reader was getting a lot of traction and a core of people were beginning to use its social functions, they could have backdoored themselves into being Digg/Reddit/Etc. and had the social media userbase to take on Facebook organically.
Instead, they fought the last war (Gmail vs Hotmail), intentionally eroded and then killed Reader, and with G+ they completely fucked up what was a cleaner interface (if not all that special) and a better technological experience, all while they were a brand that was at that time more trusted than their competitors.
Yep. Once they screwed up G+, I committed to never becoming dependent on any Google service beyond Drive and Gmail, and only those two because they’re completely untouchable - Google couldn’t break those without having a mass rebellion on its hands.
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)
Yup. I have a bunch of invites (for sane people only)
Uhh… I can’t prove I’m sane, but a DM would be nice…!
This guy is crazy! Don’t listen to him!
Welp. Was worth a shot…
I requested an invite a couple of months ago when I downloaded the app. Wish someone would invite me!
I’d love an invite if it’s still available (:
I would love one if you have a spare.
If I could have one, I’m waiting for months now. :(
It says that in the first sentence
lol they didn’t even bother reading the lemmy description. 😂
Yes, that’s part of what’s surprising about the number.
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.
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I would prefer not to use the letter in any form.
Fuck Ruskie Muskie
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
I didn’t bother and was gonna give it a walk around. Downloaded but can’t access without an invite.
I’ve been trying to get an invite since June.
Apparently if you ask, you’re not good enough or some shit.
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I wonder why people aren’t going for mastodon.
Mastadon (and the Fediverse in general, to some extent) has problems with discoverability and the average user finds federation confusing. People tend to either use microblogging to see what’s going on with people they’re interested in or to broadcast their activities to a large group of people, and Mastadon currently doesn’t fit that niche very well.
Pretty much this. It’s why I love it for my use case (microblogging journal that only I can see), but it’s definitely not for everyone else.
It’s why if your average influencer or news consumer wants a Twitter alternative, it’s likely Threads or perhaps BlueSky, not Mastodon.
The same reason people aren’t going for Lemmy.
Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user, those same users are entrenched and connected to everyone they already want to be connected to on the same platform. Until they are essentially forced to move, they’ll stay on Twitter. The people on Lemmy and Mastodon right now are a tiny but vocal minority compared to the massive userbases of the platforms they abandoned.
Yeah there really needs to be a rethink of how the Fediverse works.
I don’t want to have to subscribe to 8 different “Games” subs each with under 3000 users.
It really should be like “topics” more than “sublemmys” (or whatever) where every post on the Fediverse tagged “games” will appear on your feed when you subscribe to the topic.
The topics still get moderated by the local instance topic moderators and instances can defederate from troubled instances, but discoverability would improve exponentially.
Maybe how it could work is sublemmies could agree to link up and share posts so for example the posts from one games sub would appear in the other games sub and vice versa.
It seems the limitation with the topics idea is who would decide what the topics are? Would there just be a list of like 20 topics baked into Lemmy and people that create sublemmies would tag their sub with a topic? I think the only limitation with that is there would be so many niche subs that don’t fit cleanly into one topic, or will be drowned out by the big subs in there maybe. Maybe it could work though if anybody could create new topics, then there could be a Fallout for example with the Fallout subs being in that rather than having to be in the games topic and being drowned out
Yeah it sorta needs to be back to hashtags to tag content so that it can all be in a community despite being in different instances and subs. It’s really disjointed and currently the fediverse feels like we went back to AOL chat rooms where it’s a lot of people waiting in their own room for someone to come in and talk to them.
It doesn’t work and it doesn’t really inspire conversation anymore.
Yeah it is like that unfortunately. I mean the larger subs are fine but the niche ones just aren’t working on Lemmy atm and some way of addressing the sub splintering would help a lot. And yeah hashtags would probably be a solid way of addressing it.
Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user
How did the average user ever figure out email?
Was a open source platform run on donations entirely ever be a competition for something huge like Twitter? This is a first afaik.
I’d say Bitcoin is a bigger example.
yeah but like yesn’t. bitcoin isn’t a good example imo
How so? A decentralized open source platform with no owner which has a 500B market cap and 220 millions users.
I feel like that’s exactly what we are talking about. I understand the negative sentiment over crypto, but this is a fact.
Or maybe the difference is that it hasn’t stifled some competitor platform yet. I can agree with that because it’s not a parallel in that it’s competing with nothing.
Do people either make money or think they’ll make money simply by using the Fediverse? One can certainly advertise via guerrilla marketing on a Fediverse platform but it’s far more lucrative to advertise on mainstream social media.
Are you saying brands don’t want to come to the fediverse to market their products? I mean if that’s true that seems like a good thing, and even if it wasn’t I’m sure they would once Lemmy/Mastadon are big enough
I’m on there, but I use Twitter and mastodon as a follower, I don’t post. So until most of the 40ish people I follow move I’m stuck with Twitter if I want to see their posts. And I do.
depending on how popular the user is on Twitter, you may be able to follow them on Mastodon via https://bird.makeup/. I use it to follow things like larger content creators, NHL teams, stuff like that.
Oh interesting. I was unaware.
different features and scalability
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Congratulations of joining mastodon today. 😆
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Not only is it open, but you can check it out yourself and install right from source if you really want to get under the hood.
I’ve seen folks out there running a 1-person masto instance, just so they can partake in the fedi from their own fully sovereign platform. Bit extreme for me, but cool that it’s an option. Definitely not just another FB in other words
EDIT: Oh dang there’s a one-click app on DO even.
Have you at all attempted to look? It’s open source.
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What is why it is not being “downloaded”? It seems you don’t actually understand how it works. You realize we are talking on a federated network right now, yeah? You must be trolling.
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Since you appear to be talking about a Mastodon mobile app and not the Mastodon network a fair bit of negative reviews are about many of the mobile apps blocking access to Gab. Gab switched to a Mastodon back end back in 2019 or so and several of the apps started to blacklist using that instance at the app level as a consequence. Usually negative reviews about that will refer to “the largest Mastodon instance”, which Gab actually was by sheer numbers.
There was even an issue request to hardcode blacklisting Gab into the backend, though they were basically told no in no uncertain terms.
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Point it out and share it with everyone. That’s what FOSS is all about. I bet you won’t.
Of course they won’t. They’re shilling their own product which is a competitor to Mastodon.
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Literally. The android app is superb. It has come a long way with Material You theming, smoothness, and stuff. Compare that to the crap you would call twitter, X or whatever.
Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw
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.
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.
“I have never met Elon, and by all accounts he is terrible. However, I have seen the yacht that he paid for, and it is terrific.”
Did you not read the text messages between them? Jack was being a real fan boy
Of course he’s endorsed Musk purchasing Twitter, he made billions off it
I signed up just to see the hype, and it’s the same boring Twitter, with less commitment. People just grabbing namespace.
Excuse me, signups on an INVITE ONLY platform?
I have few invites if anyone needs
Any chance you have any more? I’d love one
bsky-social-exmoh-54452
Thank you!!
I d like one if you can spare one
bsky-social-k4wtu-albgr
If you still have any, I’d appreciate one.
bsky-social-f36an-iw7gb
Thank you 🙏
Welcome
I’d like one if still available, please.
bsky-social-6yprh-qgtd3
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I could make use of one of those invites. Thank you.
bsky-social-ahf2c-hwzzy
Appreciate it, but you should have sent them by DM. It’s used by someone else now.
Same here :(
Would appreciate one :)
bsky-social-ylgua-e7m7l
I think other miscreants have already swiped it :(
Did you check all 5
Yes
Bad luck then
Ot makes no sense,
what the fuck is Bluesky
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.
So is it going to be part of the fediverse at one point or will it be a separate federation?
separate federation, they use their own home-grown protocol called ATProto
Ahh as an alternative to Activity Pub or whatever it’s called? That’s a shame
Ahh as an alternative to Activity Pub or whatever it’s called?
Seems like it
God… I’ve been on the “fediverse” for months and
A: have no clue what it is
And
B: am not even entirely sure I’m on it anymore
Love Lemmy but lol this is getting confusing, is Mastodon on Lemmy or… just federated or… sheesh I need to search this
The fediverse is basically anything that uses some means of connecting to other sites. A lot of them now use ActivityPub, a standard for this kind of thing.
Mastodon isn’t “on” Lemmy, but they can communicate with each other
It doesn’t really matter. If you find value in using it, just keep using it.
That hasn’t been specified, which suggests they’re aiming for the latter.
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.
Honestly, before reading this comment I never noticed that BlueSky shortens to BS, lol
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Always good to see more people looking into platforms besides Twitter, plenty of great places out there
Until they sell that platform too and you have to grow your follower base somewhere else yet again.
Bluesky has federation in testing in a sandbox open to external developers, already interoperating with 3rd party implementations
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It’s not even Fediverse either. It’s their own protocol. Can’t even really federate much either.
They have federation on in their sandbox network with 3rd party clients already working, but it’s not going to talk activitypub
Non-activitypub federated protocols? Who is even the 3rd party in this instance? Nostr?
Nostr is a wildly different protocol from atprotocol and activitypub.
Activitypub is very much like email (SMTP) over http, pushing messages between servers. Atprotocol is instead using a model of a repository with profile and posts per user on federated servers along with aggregation servers (CDN-ish) and a pull model for retrieval. Nostr is a P2P protocol with “gossip nodes”
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Yeah and also Gmail should defederate Skype.
… Wait what’s that it’s different protocols? Oh well
I wouldn’t hold my breath, 42k out of 528M is nothing
I’m so glad people are calling Bluesky out for the trash service it is. I just mastodon outlasts this crap and we get more people on there than bluesky
What’s wrong with Blue sky?
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Yeah, but they work until someone decides to fuck it up. Federation isn’t the holy grail you think it is.
Admins (often a very very small group if not a single person managing an instance) still make unilateral decisions about federation and content or the very existence of that instance, and if your home instance suddenly defederates or goes poof, too bad, time to start over on a different instance with a new account with the exact same risks or maintain multiple accounts.
If this sounds familiar, it’s awfully similar to what reddit did with their API by cutting off access points to content which is why most of us are here. Same shit, different shade of brown.
Having been active on mastodon.lol and watching it get shuttered because the admin didn’t have teeth in the game shows how dangerously fragile the fediverse can be. My engagement with Mastodon as a whole has been less since mastodon.lol shut down. You can move accounts but you can’t move posts and 301s only work until the instance is gone.
I have to agree. Federation only goes a little way on the path to a proper decentralized social media system. Ideally, defederation should not be possible, and rather, community subscription should be the norm without concern over what instance it exists on.
I’m not saying it should become Usenet, but it should be more similar to Usenet than it is now.
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Oh, but mastodon doesn’t have a good algorithm like Twitter it is hard to switch
The whole point of Mastodon not having an algorithm to show you things is to put the user in control of what kind of content they want to see.
Why do you need an algorithm to tell you what you are interested in? You go on Mastodon and subscribe to what you want to.
Mastodon has algorythms. Otherwise it couldn’t display the posts in the right orders, by example.
You’re right. That word has always been kind of dumbly used as a replacement for something like, “feed manipulation controlled by corporate interests”. Every computer application uses algorithms in some way.
Because it’s hard to find things, the normal person is used to an algorithm
I remeber Facebook before algorithms took over.
You friended and followed things, and then you’d see content from those things only in either chronological order or by recent activity. People loved it and as “the algorithm” took over people complained that they were no longer being served the content they wanted and expected and were also seeing content they did not want to see from stuff they had never followed or shared interest in.
Fuck the magical algorithm that’s tailored to serve me divisive content because that is what drives the most engagement. Or serves me content to sway my political and moral opinions to the benefit of some wannabe oligarch or government entity (looking at you TikTok/CCP).
CEO is a musk toesucker.
And of cource i misread that as “CEO is Mr. mark toesucker”
If you run “Mark Zuckerberg” through google translate a few dozen times I’m sure it’ll spit that out at some point
I firmly believe Elon is trying to run Twitter out of relevancy, or business entirely.
Lose $42 billion speed run challenge
I agree but I don’t understand why. What motivated him to sink 1/4th of his net worth into Twitter then kill it?
The lawsuit he was destined to lose. Why do people here so often act like this was his masterplan all along? He fucked around and tried to back out, then Twitter sued him into buying the company. From what I can tell this is just Musk being Musk, reportedly he has surrounded himself with yes-men.
-
The jet tracker
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Twitter is a huge place where leftists organize
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Probably wants to pull a reddit and push Trump
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If that were true, the investors who paid him billions for the take over will want his head on a spike.
The biggest funders are the Saudis, who hate Twitter for the way it allowed communication during The Arab Spring. 42 billion is nothing to them. They want Twitter to die, or be run the way the want it.
As Twitter is a big PR tool for Ukraine he’s again doing Putin a favour.
I think his Saudi funders are pleased.
Who is the target audience for BlueSky?BlueSky’s tech isn’t as open or developed as the alternatives though, is it?Edit:
Not sure why I asked that first question, answer’s obvious, so it was more out of frustration I think. Sort of in a similar way towards people moving to Threads or any other corporate social media again after getting screwed before.it’s invite only, which first makes you think, “oh cool - no spammers!”
but then you realize you just need one spammer to get in and now they only invite spammers, and control their invites… as a form of spam! Flooding the net with “cheap” invite codes (only $10!) and multiplying.
Invite only makes people think no spammers? Have they never been in any space with minimal obstacles to entry like that? Any place people are, there’s going to be someone or some activity you don’t care for.
Makes me think of folks thinking there will be fewer annoying people in online games with sub fees. 😂
Seems pretty easy to control though.
Once spammer is detected, you just ban them and the account that invited, all the way up a down that invite tree.
And in the process nuke every legitimate user who may have used their codes, great way to build trust in a new platform. You can’t even vet users to see if they are spammers or not because you need an account to view the service.
Wellp, Nintendo intentionally breaks their own games if you pirate their stuff. Not allowing bribes is a simmlar looking situation. “This product is defective the last person who had their hands on it mustve screwed it up somehow.”
Nintendo intentionally breaks their own games if you pirate their stuff.
I’m not aware of them doing this all that often. In fact, it’s more something that game developers do from time to time, rather than Nintendo specifically. The classic one being when they introduce a bug that only affects the pirated release, then every time they get a report on that bug they know the user pirated their copy.
Yeah I’m not sure what exactly they’re referring to. if they’re referring to the N64 games that was the developer Rare who did it, not Nintendo, Nintendo is just the publisher. If it’s related to Switch games then it’s possible they’re referring to Online only games or the many many Piracy-related myths as well as disinformation that plagues the Switch Modding scene to this day.
Invite only is a technique that becomes a hinderance and gimmic after about 100k members.
God I hope he gets gaslit into actually making Twitter a subscription. It would be so funny
I’m starting to suspect he only wanted Twitter to kill it…
It is weird how he’s just completely running it into the ground… I don’t really buy that though because he never actuslly wanted the company and only bought it because a court forced him to. Also I honestly don’t think he’d want to wash 44 big ones down the drain just to own the libs.
All I can think of is that he’s just… maybe kind of an idiot and has just gotten lucky so far lol? It’s the only thing that fits as far as I can see.
Some have suggested that the purchase was partly to prevent a second Arab spring. Saudi funding and increased cooperation make it a possibility but I’m not sold on any particular idea besides “avoid everything Elon touches.” Why anyone stayed on ragebait bot network: the website is beyond my understanding.
Switch to Mastodon. It’s a great alternative.
