The platform crossed the milestone last night, and it happened about a month and a half after the 25 million mark. Bluesky still has a long way to go to pass Threads, though; Meta’s platform has more than 100 million daily active users.
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3lgu4lg6j2k2v]
It is a decent format for businesses, organizations, musicians/comedians/touring acts etc. to announce events and goings on to the general public. For discourse, it’s complete garbagepuke.
Which of those are not “advertising” of one sort or another? Twitter was a dumb idea to start and I still just don’t see any appeal.
FB had my friends (now is a stupid cesspool of echo chamber idiocy.
Insta was photo-based FB Lite.
Fark>Slashdot>Digg>Reddit>Lemmy was/is about community and sharing of ideas and thoughts. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, but the anonymity gave everyone an equal opportunity to participate.
The early days of Twitter seemed to be 10,000 people yelling in a room and nobody listening. Then celebrities took over and companies followed. Enshittifying it early on in the process.
At some point I’m not averse to advertising. I’m fine with Burger King having signs on their buildings.
My water bill comes with a one page flyer from the town every month which announces things like planned road construction, the obligatory “as we enter [whatever] season, remember that it probably presents a fire hazard somehow” from the fire department (seriously I’m surprised they didn’t warn against knocking candles over during Valentine’s Day fucking) and a list of events that the town library, community college and other such organizations are putting on open to the public.
I see a place or even a need for a similar platform that operates at a national or global scale.
I’m reminded of the Bloody Board, which if I understand the story correctly was a Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site whose owner was kind of misusing a forum engine as an announcement board, so if you didn’t know that bit of context it looked like someone going completely insane. A writer for Cracked.com didn’t know that bit of context, and wrote an article about how someone was apparently going completely insane, and Cracked’s audience took that at face value and basically broke it. Having a Twitter account, or a Mastodon account, that does the same thing, posting about a TV show (quotes, memorable scenes, interviews with cast and crew, appearances at conventions and stuff, fan meet and greets etc) would seem perfectly normal.
The thing I’m envisioning might be closer to an RSS feed except it’s a platform.