alt Hacker NewsI 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?
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Here’s another site that tracks monthly active users based on people posting or other activity such as liking a post. It also shows a decline in activity. Scroll down and it looks like a decline of about 40% over a year.
Not only that, part of the point of the whole "atproto" business is to allow alternate frontends and backends. The official mobile app is kind of bad. A number of people have migrated to Blacksky (alternate backend) following a moderation fallout as well.
Not having the app installed but being a monthly active user, not just someone who's driving by because they clicked on a link on mobile seems like an edge case and I'm pretty sure it won't make a difference to the numbers.
> you don't need to use a mobile app
Since they're apparently tracking mobile app MAUs as a KPI, expect this to change.
Same. With the exception of Reddit (which I use a different client for anyway), I tend to just use the sites themselves.
Part of it is just not wanting those apps to invade the rest of my life. I know I can turn off notifications and things, but for some weird reason it helps me stay a bit more detached from social media when I'm forced to rely on the site.
The other part is privacy. I don't want the Facebook app on my phone. I don't want to have to worry about what permissions it wants and whether I've unchecked the right things. Using the web is easier for me in that respect.
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To be clear, since the mobile app users are decreasing, what you would actually need to claim is that "web users are more likely to continue using the app than mobile users are", not just that "there are a lot of web users", since the base assumption is that web and mobile users use the site in similar ways. I don't really see any reason to believe the former, and actually having worked on social media extensively I think there's a strong chance that the opposite is true, that if mobile users are declining web users are declining even faster. There's a reason sites push mobile apps so much and it's because retention is normally far better.