alt Hacker NewsBluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app
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Maybe Bluesky is not quite the Twitter rival it set out to be, but it's got a better shot than Mastodon, according to the user count graphs here:
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.
There are too many bots on BlueSky. Atleast in the niche I post within (game development). There are lots of automated accounts out there meant to like, repost, and signal boost. I appreciate the gesture but when all your engagement comes from these accounts it’s frustrating. I don’t want retweets and likes, I want people to engage with what I post.
Bots are also an issue on twitter. But I get way more actual engagement there than I ever got on BlueSky. What gives? The most insidious bots are those that leave replies based on keywords in your post. It looks legitimate until you go to their profile and see they are cranking out replies every second to posts in a topic.
If Meta had put Threads on the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub, things could have been so different... maybe there's still time. The engineering philosophy for AT / Bluesky is incredible, being able to develop your own timeline algorithms, distributed moderation agencies, etc. But whenever I give Bluesky a try unfortunately I just can't find people talking about my interests. This seems like a scale problem, which Threads solves.
I wanted to like bluesky, I really tried, but when 90% of it ( after filtering out politics ) is people talking about the platform itself, it's off-putting.
I don't want to hear about atproto, or "the atmosophere", I want to hear about actually interesting things.
It'd be like if 90% of twitter was talking about twitter the platform, it's an odd thing to focus on.
We have ample evidence that platforms whose goal is to shove everyone you've ever met into the same room isn't a good thing. Modest growth and a healthy community that doesn't have to include everyone to succeed seems like a good thing.
> Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app
Are they implying a causal relationship between their shrinking user base and their focus expansion? The article doesn't give any proof whatsoever.
Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...
there's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky.
people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.
As an anecdote, I switched a year or two ago along with most everyone I followed on X.
It’s nothing like the vibe on old Twitter. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ideologically siloed. I’m quite left of center, but everyone on bluesky seems to be a caricature; the blue-haired loonies the right memes about. People there are seriously intolerant of anything other than their perceived orthodoxy. I don’t know what made it this way but it’s simply not usable purely by virtue of who’s there.
I’ve come to think there’s no “better” social media.
People just seem to leave social media entirely.
Bluesky's feed algorithm (the "Discover" tab) is the worst I've ever seen. Hands down. I can't imagine anyone enjoying it unless they're 1) super into the US politics/domestic issues AND 2) politically aligned with the main user base of Bluesky.
The funniest part is that there is a better algorithm. It's right here: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-...
But somehow the devs of Bluesky never thought of making it the default tab. They should be making a better Twitter but what they're actually building is just Truth Social for the left.
Bluesky's active user base has never not been shrinking, no matter what they were focusing on.
The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years is that bluesky has fewer users than it did last month. It's entire life is due to lib slactivism. It started under the conceit of being a p2p public service, took VC, and its founder bailed and badmouthed it. It's entire existence is ideological, which is why its boosters sound like evangelists.
This is just media promotion, hopefully to bump up user numbers for a week or two, but really so the people who work at the VC firms that put money into this dog have something to show to their bosses.
How are the X figures computed ? Bluesky is a public network, anyone can analyse and count. What about X, held by Musk ?
Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
The only promising social network to me was that browser extension that let you comment on every single page, but it was shut down when people freaked out that it (obviously) sent the URL of every page you visited to their servers. I've wanted something like that for so long. There just isn't enough thread-based discussion happening online. It's all buried in what are essentially darkweb chatrooms (unindexed Discord chats)
Reddit is dominated by the left, but there are other voice audible.
Twitter has plenty of leftists. They are very, very, very easy to find, as is every other shape and size of political, ideological, or spiritual thought; far easier than, say, a non-leftist viewpoint on the worldnews or politics subreddits, which because of their default status are much more inescapable than any one Twitter account.
There are very, very few non-left people on Bluesky. "JD Vance Becomes Most Blocked Person on BlueSky Days After Joining App" <https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-bluesky-blocked-social-med...>
Even Bluesky's top users say so.
"Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the 'lack of diversity of thought' is actually pushing users back to X" <https://fortune.com/2025/06/12/bluesky-backfiring-mark-cuban...>
"Bluesky is not the good place" <https://www.ms.now/opinion/bluesky-elon-musk-twitter-replace...>
But it could be worse. Bluesky has block list dissemination (à la how, if you make one comment in a "wrong" subreddit, a whole bunch of others will automatically ban you despite never having even heard of them), but I don't think even it ever gets so bad as individual Mastodon instances' ability to self-destruct in spectacularly amusing fashion. mastodon.lol example over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As rvz said in the link,
>This is just one of many Mastodon instances which are undergoing an extinction event which involves: turning against themselves and destroying each other. This time, it is over a children's video game.
That said, I suppose that such self-immolation might be a good thing; sort of an immune system-like response. There are many, many mentally ill that steep far too long in Bluesky (and 80% of Reddit)'s ever-boiling toxic soup.
This thread is primed for shitting on Bluesky, but the level of discourse among the people I follow has only grown over the past few years. In no way does it feel like a dying platform. (Same for Mastodon, actually.)
I tried Bluesky after Threads because the ads were getting to me.
I reposted one picture of my favorite bird, the albatross, and then my feed was 100% bird pictures. I'm not interested in birds generally, just albatrosses specifically. But they were nice enough pictures so I kept using the app.
Then I tried telling it about my other interest which was robotics, and so I started liking posts about autonomous cars. Specifically, one day I liked a picture of some guy filming in in his car some other guy sleeping in his Tesla while it was driving autonomously on the highway.
After that my feed was flooded with selfies of dudes in their car. Like, "goodmorning sunshine, off to work, here's a quick selfie of me". Every time I opened the app it was just a parade of bird pictures and selfies of bearded dudes in their cars. At least on Threads the thirst traps were thirsty!
Bluesky had no idea what my interests were. On Threads we used to do a thing like "Hey @algorithm, send me people who are interested in X Y Z" and that worked. Actually first it didn't and then Threads made it official after so many people did it. But even still when it wasn't official it still seemed Threads was able to provide a better feed than Bluesky.
So I quit. Congrats Bluesky, tough feat but you've somehow found a way to be more annoying than ads.
Interesting quote:
"For Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities."
Code: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Website: https://atproto.com/
I hope against hope that people started to realize that the problem isn't the platform, it's the entire approach.
Who am I kidding, people just realized that Bluesky wasn't going to be the next big thing and so it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.
Can someone pretty please create a decent alternative to X?
Bluesky is a buggy borderline nonfunctional mess.
The fediverse does literally everything better than it. Bluesky by comparison is completely inferior and redundant.
I notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?