Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app

EA-3167

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.

frozenseven

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/

dbbk

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.

blakesterz

Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...

jimmydoe

there's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky. people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.

halyconWays

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)

omoikane

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://bsky.jazco.dev/stats 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.

cdrnsf

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.

TMWNN

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.

raincole

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.

ecshafer

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.

semiquaver

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.

slashdave

Can someone pretty please create a decent alternative to X?

eterm

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.

VCFundedGenYer

Bluesky is a buggy borderline nonfunctional mess. The fediverse does literally everything better than it. Bluesky by comparison is completely inferior and redundant.