I don't understand how Bluesky is going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.
I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.
Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected. Most stats seem to be leveling off (which isn't exactly stable growth either so the rest of your points stand).
Yeah, I think what you needed to do here is zoom out. That's a sharply declining chart.
I understand that as a Bluesky user the peak and dropoff doesn't hurt the experience. But investors are going to put money in with the expectation of a return and what they're going to look at are the derivatives of the adoption curve: how quickly is it gaining users, and is adoption accelerating?
I zoomed out. It looks like this:
"Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected"
That just isn't a "sharp decline" no matter how much you seem to want to repeat those words.
I agree that it’s not a sharp decline but zooming out, what I see is absolutely no organic growth at all in the past couple of years. All the increases have been sharp spikes that immediately fall off dramatically, followed by longer, slower periods of decline. It looks like nobody is switching to Bluesky except in a handful of viral events, during which a tonne of people try it out but don’t keep using it. There’s only one upward slope on these graphs, and that stopped in late 2023 – about the time Threads went fully global. These look like very unhealthy stats.
Those are Jaz’s daily unique action counts (flows) from the Bluesky firehose; they’re anchored to the Nov ’24 spike, so the ‘decline’ is post-surge reversion. Meanwhile the user stock kept rising (~39M).
A presidential election spike is the baseline for tracking growth in a social media platform??
What’s “user stock”? Is that the number of registered accounts? Isn’t it basically impossible for that to do anything but go up? It’s the number of people actively using the network that’s the important figure, not the total number of people who ever used it.
Are these the figures you are reporting?
> We made a new Bluesky stats page to see how the platform is growing. Unfortunately it is currently shrinking.
> Last week the total number of users registered hit 36M, but actually only 13M of those showed any activity in the last 90 days.
Right, so the basic story you're telling investors there is that between August and September of 2024 they experienced a sharp spike, and then basically they stayed that way for over a year. That's not a dying platform, but it's not a growth story you take to investors either.
How does it compare to other social networks like Twitter? Can't compare because they don't offer granular data this detailed? That tells you something.
That doesn't matter! In fact, Twitter doing worse while Bluesky usage is dropping probably makes them significantly less investable.
I'm not rooting for them to fail. I use Bluesky. I find Twitter's ownership odious and the platform significantly worse than it was 4 years ago.
But if we're talking about scientific communicators talking about where the future of scientific communication is going to happen, it is relevant whether Bluesky has a long-term future. There's another non-Twitter social network that doesn't operate under this funding pressure!
See, that's a good question, but it has an answer: first, they took a priced round, and those investors will need to see a return, and second, when the funding runs out, someone is going to have to put more money in --- substantially more money --- to keep the lights on.
What's probably true is that if they found a stable source of revenue they wouldn't have to answer these kinds of questions. But this is just back to my original point, of "I don't see how this is going to work", because I don't see how they're going to do that.
I'd be happy if someone jumped in and set me straight with a clear and plausible plan. To me, though, from the information I've seen, it looks like the premise here is that they're going to raise again, and to do that they're going to need to demonstrate accelerating growth, which they starkly do not have right now.
I’m one of the (independent) board members of Bluesky and I can say with confidence that I don’t have any of these concerns, everyone involved is deeply aligned to the PBC’s purpose of “To develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.”
None of the concerns I've raised are about alignment. I'm not concerned for Bluesky's investors. I'm concerned about the long-term viability of the platform given its adoption curve and its financing.
If it helps, nothing I'm saying has anything to do with whether ATProto will succeed. ATProto could succeed (and fulfill one possible overarching goal of the PBC) and Bluesky would still not be a long-term viable forum for scientific communication (because it will stop existing in its current form).
What investors? It isn't a public company, and it's registered as a benefit corporation. Anybody who gives them money should have a clue that its priority is not shareholder returns.
Every social network has grown in fits and starts. Bluesky could be doing better but it’s already doing very well and is sustainable and future proof in many ways.
What I've found is that most of the people I really want to follow are exclusively on bsky. BUT most of the people I'd prefer to casually follow either exclusively or mostly only posts on Twitter. And the 2nd group is a much larger pool than the first group.
I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.
I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.
I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with.
Those types of people are still there on Twitter (mostly on the other side these days), but I don't see them because the algorithm filters them out.
You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.
> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,
Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look
I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.
Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.
A Bluesky dev has admitted that the "show less/more" items did nothing. It was in the context of supposedly hooking them up to real code at long last, though I've yet to see any practical difference. Anyone who claims they worked all along is not arguing in good faith.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy
If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
By default bluesky blocks adult content, once you enable it you can dial in what kind of adult content you wish to see. I know this is all anecdotal, like the links you posted... But I started a new account to see what it's like. I can scroll the default algorithm for 5 minutes and not see anything questionable, and my actual account exists with adult content turned on and I never see it. After signing up the new account, I can search for furry or diaper content, but it appears that none of it is like "nsfw" (mostly just people in furry costumes or diapers but no sexual content or nudity).
Just to solidify, I just went and created a new account to ensure I was right, and I was. You need to go to your settings, go to moderation, and enable adult content. I scrolled continuously for 5 minutes straight and saw no adult content on a default account. And on top of this, as far as I can google, Bluesky has never had adult content enabled by default, so if you are seeing it, you enabled it.
> I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup. Heaps and heaps of political rage bait on the main discover feed? Yup.
Unlike X, blue sky defaults to simply showing you a feed of the people you follow, in chronological order.
I never see that but on both sites I only ever look at the feed that only includes people I follow. I don’t understand why anyone would use a feed that includes other co the t
Yes. And I seeded my feed with people I already knew. Just like I did with Twitter back in 2008. And just like Twitter all those years ago, from seeing what they repost, I expanded my network.
People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.
They do really need to do something about this, I am not on regularly anymore but there was a period where i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.
> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
You can just Google these things. Nate Silver posted (grim looking) usage numbers --- followers and posters --- just a couple weeks ago. They very publicly raised a $15MM (priced) A round a year ago, after raising what I understood to be a comparable amount of seed funding. There was talk early this year of them raising again at a $700MM valuation, but I don't see a subsequent announcement that that happened.
You can generally take a headcount number and assign a fully loaded cost to it (say, $200k, conservatively) and just math it out. And of course that analysis assumes their infra expenditures round to zero.
So no, I'm not just making stuff up. I could be wrong! I feel like I was open about that.
I think you’re going to need to back that up in order for me to take your claim seriously. I’ve always found Nate Silver to be opinionated, sure, but with opinions based on data.
(To be clear, I’m not disputing that Silver thinks BlueSky is failing—I’ll take your word for that—I’m disputing that he’s doing so because he had an axe to grind rather than data backing him up.)
It doesn't matter, because nobody is taking Nate Silver's word for anything. That Nate Silver dunks on Bsky is of absolutely no probative value whatsoever.
Saying "you can google it" when the range of online information is massive is not a helpful thing to say. What numbers are you believing and why?
Nate Silver has basically zero juice on Bluesky, people go there to get away from that sort of "expert" that's got a huge profile already but is hard to escape if you are uninterested in his takes.
I mean he'll, take his own word on it, it's not the social network for him!
You didn't point to his numbers so that wasn't clear, but either way, Silver has beef with bsky because he isn't popular there and he likes to whine about it.
The usage numbers I've seen are down from their peak last November but have mostly stabilized at this point. The devs say they have multiple years of runway, and each time there is an exodus from twitter the numbers have a sharp increase and then decline to a stable number higher than they started.
13 months ago there were 200k daily likers and now there are 1.2 million. Yes, that is down from the highest peak directly after the election, but the 1.2 million has been fairly steady for the past ~4 months and if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
They were linked in the thread by the person complaining about them in an ancestor of your comment.
> if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
> Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that Twitter itself was on pretty shaky financial ground (and likely still is, though being private now makes that harder to know). Even if Bluesky managed to absorb the entirety of Twitter’s user base, it’s still unclear whether that translates into a strong business model.
Yes: Plenty of criticism has been aimed at how Twitter was run, and maybe Bluesky is managed more effectively right now, but there's no evidence to suggest Bluesky would be run significantly better at that scale.
I’ve noticed this anxiety on steam reviews too, people seem to stress out if there isn’t a continuous growth of a game’s player base, like there’s a totality that we all need to be striving for, even in a federated space, even in a game’s player base, otherwise any shrinking indicates a spiral. Not that they aren’t real (the spirals) but there’s an aspect of putting the cart before the horse here.
Also, linkedin says 53 people, though crazies like to say they're employed places. It does say 29 in the US so that's more likely real. Assuming that skews eng a bit, that's probably (225 fully loaded eng, 150 fully loaded the rest) $6m in payroll alone. Not to mention server expenses. That's tough.
The case for more funding: 1 - yolo; 2 - non-economic investments; 3 - Musk gonna Musk, so expect Twitter to further shed users. There may be a business to be built there if you can run significantly more efficiently than Twitter which was a shockingly poorly-operated business (Zuck was dead on re: the clown car. Except maybe more like a silver mine, not a gold mine.). Oh, and 4 - the EU is pretty hostile to Twitter and Threads, so maybe there's some there there. Dunno.
Yeah, this is basically where I'm coming from. There are ideologues and stans arguing both ways whether Bluesky is a moribund platform. I don't think it's intrinsically moribund. But I think that's the wrong question. The more important question is: is it succeeding to the point where it will attract another round of investment? That case is I think pretty hard to make based on the available public evidence --- but the Bsky people obviously know a lot more about this than I do!
I think the case can be made that twitter itself is unsustainable, and that the goal to create a new business model or social media system is part of the idea behind Bsky.
Admittedly- this does not sound like the investment thesis that raises 700mn usd. But! the larger goal of Bsky is to not be twitter, and to be a different type of social media. In general, its not going to be as good.
Whether there is a business model at the intersection of not-twitter and new social media, is to be discovered.
Taking a stab at it - I suppose the question is whether this can be converted into any sort of cheap subscription based model, which is efficient to run on long time horizons and so breaks even, long enough to keep attracting users, and offloading moderation tasks to user groups.
> I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon.
What do you count as "engagement"? Views/likes? Those can be produced. Interesting conversations that aren't obviously LLM can't. That's the metric I use for anecdotally seeing Bluesky (and Mastodon) as immensely more engaging in a signal/noise ratio.
> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also famously twitter is losing value and advertisers and users still it’s not stopped twitter from existing
Regarding engagement doesn’t twitter have lot more low quality engagement vs Bkuesky
I have the opposite problem. My Bluesky (and Mastodon) feeds have gotten so active that I have a hard time catching up these days. And Twitter seems to be mostly full of bloviating narcissists who are addicted to feeling like “influencers” of the unwashed masses, not co-equal participants of public discussion.
More broadly, Twitter’s problem is that it carpet bombed the bridge with a substantial portion of its intelligent population. I’m pretty sure half the tech, game dev, and research people I follow on Bluesky/Mastodon will not return under any circumstance, myself included.
No. Government should be using a self-hosted instance of something standard and federated (ie, an ActivityPub implementation such as Mastodon). That can be federated out to the walled gardens (Twitter), vulture-capital places (Bluesky), etc as needed.
I think platforms like that will survive on essentially rage and bitterness. People will always flock to platforms like X, Bluesky, iFunny, and others to vent and rage. There's so much anger in nearly every post that I don't see any of it as particularly useful, or a good use of one's time.
It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.
I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.