After attracting 2 million users in its first year of operation, Bluesky has grown another 400 percent with some recent help from Brazil and Elon Musk. Are these monthly or daily users, or just account holders? Nobody knows! But it still has a way to go to match X’s estimated 250 million daily users and Threads’ 175 million monthly users.
More likely twitter users.
And yes it’s corporate which is less good than mastodon.
But it is add-free, has a working algorithm, is feature rich, is open-source, lets you self-host etc. Full defederation is coming soon too.
Having used both bluesky (self hosted) and mastodon. The experience is simply far better on bluesky.
Unlike lemmy vs reddit. Where (except for active user count) there isn’t really a tradeoff. Lemmy is simply far better.
I think the true genius of Bluesky is that it doesn’t have A algorithm, it has a framework that allows users to build their own algorithms, share them with others, and subscribe to the algorithms from people whose tastes you trust. They did the same thing with moderation making it possible to build your own moderation tools, share them, and use those constructed by others you trust.
It’ll be abused by the trolls who love the sound of their own voice and embrace the echo chamber of their choosing, but the flip side is that none of the rest of us have to suffer those idiots if we don’t want to. It’s not a perfect solution to the Paradox of Tolerance, but it’s good enough.
There was lot of people recommending BlueSky over Fediverse, when the big hype happened. The biggest problem to me is, that this split up the user base considerably. Which in turn weakened its potential for both platforms to overtake Twitter.
Just under us: If you want so, we took Twitter over. It’s renamed to X. :-p …, nah, just joking, it’s still Twitter.
I mean thanks to bridgy you can communicate across blusky and mastodon. For example people can follow my mastodon account on bluesky.
And bluesky has gained > 8 million users in the past couple months. Mastodon has 900 odd thousand MAU.
So clearly the majority have gone to one.
I don’t know where you got that number from, but at least these statistics say Mastodon got 9 million users (but not all are active off course, same should be true for BlueSky): https://mastodon-analytics.com/ And this account claims 15 million: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount and a Wikipedia article says “On 19 March 2023, Mastodon passed the ten million mark for registered user accounts”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)#2022_Twitter-related_spikes_in_adoption
Now, I do not claim these numbers to be correct. But compared to your estimation its vastly different.
Edit: Just for context of my reply, as you edited yours. You said you don’t believe Mastodon would even have 100 thousand users.
Even if your numbers are true. Mastodon has existed for 7 years. Bluesky for less than one.
So logically the precentage of users to active users should be much higher on Bluesky.
Also number of accounts is possibly a bad metric to judge mastodon because of the federation.
For example, I have 8 mastodon accounts (tried a couple different instances and programmed a couple rss bots to give me a news feed).
Comparing users to MAU seems disingenuous. The fediverse has ~12 million users, according to fedidb and around 1.1 million active ones.
Most of them on Mastodon.
It requires to use a separate app like this which is not very convenient.