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.
It’s also controlled by another crypto shill, so it has that in common with Twitter too.
How the hell do you even sign up
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Yeah that’s why I’m wondering how the heck are they signing up
Users who already have accounts on Bluesky get access codes they can give out to others over time. You don’t even need to open the app to earn access codes. You just need an account.
Basically, as the devs let more and more people in, the platform will experience exponential growth. If the devs let in one person, that one person can let in 5 more in just 2 months time, and those 5 can let in 5 more each, and so on.
Why the hell Bluesky is still invite only is beyond me. They killed their hype during the most important time, during multiple Twitter exoduses. People wanted to swap to it but couldn’t. They were so desperate that Threads got 100m users really quick, just because people so badly wanted a Twitter alternative. Invite only doesn’t even provide any benefit.
Artificial scarcity.
That’s the only real reasons anybody goes the invite-only route, (that and extremely lazy moderation) it’s mainly to create FOMO for popularity. That’s also why they aren’t publicly visible and require you to login to view posts.
Bluesky doesn’t apparently have all the user safety tools that it needs before opening the flood gates.
Wow we have a lot in common, neither does Lemmy lol
Record sign-ups my ass. I just joined today. Sites dead. Dorsey doesn’t even have an account there anymore. Jimmy Wales social media site is doing much better albeit way less people.
Incorrect. My bluesky feeds are lively af, it doesn’t work the same way twitter works. Spend more time looking around on there, maybe find some reading material on how to make bluesky engaging for you? It did take me a few days to figure the app out.
I guess I gotta find more people. I’ll keep posting and see if anything changes.
Check out the feeds section, do some searches for your interests and add those feeds. I also lucked out by finding bluesky’s version of “black twitter” fairly quickly.
Same. Mine’s too lively, but it is fairly heavily skewed towards some specific interests.
I check maybe once a day, but I can’t keep up with all that’s going on there.
Care to share an invite?
I haven’t been on long but it’s definitely active.
Weird I signed up to be notified whenever it went active and have never received an invite.
I signed up ages ago too, but I don’t think they ever sent them out like that. I got an invite from someone else.
Oh well sounds like I’m not missing much.
Depends on your interests, my feed is too active. It’s a lot of shitposting, some academics, journalists, and some just very online people.
A lot of very prolific folks from Twitter moved there.
Have any extra invites?
Sadly, I’m out at the moment.
They did early on. I got one that way when it was mostly developers and the app was basically a super early beta.
It seems like that slowed down when they realized the invite tree is a really good moderation tool. Like if they catch a spammer or CSAM pervert or whatever, they can see who invited them and nip that shit in the bud.
Also, they recently passed 1 million users and the developers said they’ll have to make some backend changes to handle 10 million users. So, they apparently really do need to manage growth and can’t just open it up.
They do send out invites to the waiting list but it definitely don’t represent the majority of invites being sent out
Jack Dorsey had an account but he got run off for being an anti-vaccine crypto dork. People just mocked him so he left and went to Nostr where his crowd hangs out. (He’s a significant investor in all of the for-profit ones, including Twitter. He doesn’t run any of them day-to-day, though, so there’s not really any reason for him to be on BlueSky socially.)
Lmao I thought it was cause he got bullied by the 196-crowd but that’s equally funny. I always figured him to be the Bluesky main guy so it’s kinda weird he isnt active on his own site.
rain is wet. hope they like starting new instances here. feel the fediverse creaking already
Can’t say I’ve felt any such issues. Probably comes down to you being on the biggest instance.
How is it on shakey ground, We may for a while just stay niche but active and high quality.
Excuse me, signups on an INVITE ONLY platform?
Ot makes no sense,
I have few invites if anyone needs
Any chance you have any more? I’d love one
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I’d like one if still available, please.
bsky-social-6yprh-qgtd3
Would appreciate one :)
bsky-social-ylgua-e7m7l
I think other miscreants have already swiped it :(
Did you check all 5
Yes
Bad luck then
I d like one if you can spare one
I could make use of one of those invites. Thank you.
If you still have any, I’d appreciate one.
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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 is a technique that becomes a hinderance and gimmic after about 100k members.
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.
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Cheer up, mastodon also gained 30000+ new users in the last two days
Edit: Source: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
Mastodon is for mentally ill people :/ bsky ftw
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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.
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.
masto is fractured even further with different servers arguing in places (a bit like here tbh) over federation.
And? Servers are inter-operable.
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.
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.
That the normie can’t just sign up and figure it out by using it is the problem. We have too many stupid and lazy people
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.
isn’t bluesky invite only?
I’ve been trying to get an invite since June.
Apparently if you ask, you’re not good enough or some shit.
You’re not missing anything. I eventually got an invite, found that 40% of the content was furry and I deleted my account.
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?
It says that in the first sentence
lol they didn’t even bother reading the lemmy description. 😂
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.
I didn’t bother and was gonna give it a walk around. Downloaded but can’t access without an invite.
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I would prefer not to use the letter in any form.
Fuck Ruskie Muskie
Xitter (pronounced shitter)
Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.
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’d love an invite if it’s still available (:
I would love an invite if you have any left
I requested an invite a couple of months ago when I downloaded the app. Wish someone would invite me!
I would love one if you have a spare.
If I could have one, I’m waiting for months now. :(
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 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’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!
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 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.
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.
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.
“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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.
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.
Yes, that’s part of what’s surprising about the number.
And Threads?
I refuse to touch anything related to Facebook. I’m shocked that people would use Threads or Instagram for that matter.
Or Mastodon?
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Although it looks like this is 3 days behind.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount I discovered this after searching abit
I’d bet mastodon saw an increase, but i haven’t seen the numbers.
It’s also hard to get a good count since it’s not centralized. So whatever numbers we do see, could be wildly underreported.
Yes, I also want to know how it is affecting the Mastodon user base.
You can check on fediverse growth anytime on fediDB, though not with daily granularity.
I found this which has registrations and posts for mastodon / fediverse over hour / day / week / month but it breaks it out by instances so can be a bit difficult to tell overall. Here’s mastodon in the last 7 days for example.
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount
You can see a spike in the last couple days. We went from about 30k/week to a 50k+ in this past week.
I do wonder how many are bots. Most of Twitter is bots anyway
what the fuck is Bluesky
I wouldn’t hold my breath, 42k out of 528M is nothing
I’ve been on the waitlist for awhile now. I don’t know anyone on it so I can’t get a code, unfortunately. Wish I was
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I got an invite from the only person I actually know on it and it’s not bad. I’m interested, but still messing around with it to get the most out of it.
Waitlist? Are you in USSR?
Bluesky’s really highkey. You need an invite or gotta sit on the waitlist for months to get an account. Real elite stuff.
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I have some left, message me if you still need one.
God I hope he gets gaslit into actually making Twitter a subscription. It would be so funny
Why would anyone think Bluesky is any better than Twitter? There are no fundamental differences.
