anime nerd extraordinaire. ♀️Bluesky numbers go down down down
Bluesky corp has always loathed the userbase it ended up with. This is why the new CEO is trying to get more totally-not-Nazis in. (The users the rationalist, coiner and neoreactionary staff originally wanted.)
The graph since 2023 shows bursts of new users every time Musk or sometimes Zuckerberg faceplants, followed by slow declines.
"focus beyond the app" is an excuse for failing at the app. The AT Proto infrastructure is a diverse decentralised ecosystem in the same sense as cryptocurrencies - it has a hard dependency on Bluesky Social PBC infra for 99.99+% of users. There is no programme to reduce that number other than saying "decentralised" a lot.
For comparison, mastodon.social is around 20% of fedi - large, but the other 80% can and do tell them to go whistle as appropriate. AT Proto was always a Not Invented Here of fedi.
It's not clear where the missing Bluesky users are going. Looks like ... nowhere!
techcrunch.com
Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app | TechCrunch
Over a year following its post-election surge, Bluesky’s mobile app is seeing a continued decline in active users, though its remaining community is still relatively engaged.
