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.

    • TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.com
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • decadentrebel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • joenforcer@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Asudox@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Was a open source platform run on donations entirely ever be a competition for something huge like Twitter? This is a first afaik.

            • locuester@lemmy.zip
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • jasory@programming.dev
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • Rambi@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  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

                  • jasory@programming.dev
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                    1 year ago

                    No I’m pointing out why the comparison to Bitcoin is inaccurate. It’s like saying that your open-source software project will work because the Linux kernel worked. The sole point of similarity has little relevance.

                    The Fediverse isn’t asset speculation, Bitcoin is.

    • Bongles@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • PlutoParty@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            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.

                  • Little1Lost@lemmy.zip
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                    1 year ago

                    but it is under the: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 Permissions of this strongest copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available.

                    So he cant revoke anyone of using the software he contributes

                  • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    It seems like you’re deliberately misrepresenting, but I’ll explain anyway because I know that some people might be confused.

                    The Mastodon app is a client on your phone which accesses servers in the network.

                    The network consists of multiple servers that are interconnected to each other. Content from one server is automatically cross-hosted to other servers when it is discovered on those other servers. That’s how Federation works. I know it’s probably an oversimplification of how activitypub works, but it’s generally good enough for most people, and the important part is really that content is present and visible on other servers.

                    When you sign up to a server your account is stored on that server, the posts that you make are stored on that server, as well as automatically cross hosted to other servers which have people following you.

                    If the owner of a server pulls the plug for whatever reason the content on that server will no longer be directly accessible, if your account is there you will lose your account. The copies on other servers will remain as they have been copied. The rest of the network will continue operating without that server and the accounts that were hosted on it.

                    About asking whether or not an instance owner can sue instances they don’t like, that sounds like absolute nonsense and I’m not even going to bother trying to understand whatever point you’re trying to make with this.