Catching up with some of the news coming out of the Atmosphere conference.
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So, Bluesky is getting more crypto VC money, more AI, and a full year of steadily declining activity.
Bluesky User Growth and Active Users
See how activity and usage of Bluesky has been growing over time. How many users are currently active? How many posts are posted daily on Bluesky?
(bluefacts.app)
While the fediverse is getting quotes, UX/UI improvements, starter packs.
Hm!
@stefan
starter packs is a terrible terrible idea. it leads to follow/follower lists in their tens of thousands to zero purpose. -
@stefan
starter packs is a terrible terrible idea. it leads to follow/follower lists in their tens of thousands to zero purpose.@botvolution Well they'll be pretty restricted, from what I've read, e.g. you'll only be able to add people to them who you follow, they'll be limited in size, you'll be notified when you get added, with an option to remove yourself, and you can opt out from being added altogether.
You'll probably be able to filter out posts that mention or link to them, I'd imagine. (Eg. filter out posts that contain a portion of the URL, if it includes something like "/collection/").
Seems like you can avoid this feature altogether as if it didn't exist at all.
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@stefan This is a cool site. Looking more closely at the daily metrics over the past year, it seems like it's flattening out. This makes sense, because I think a year+ ago, it was newer and people were still making the move over and trying it out. The growth they had at the start was never going to remain. To echo somewhat the points made in a few other comments here, that's probably a good thing.
@aaronmccollum Yes, the chart itself is nothing unusual.
To me, the interesting part is, a year ago they closed a $100 million funding round, which they just recently disclosed. And their numbers have been dropping the whole year.
Can you imagine what we could do with $100 million dollars?
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@stefan especially interesting: the daily follows have declined from 8 million a year ago to under 2 million now (a 75% drop). Even with declining user numbers there still could be a lot of user circulation (old ones leaving, new ones signing up), but then the follows would be more stable on higher levels.
Now it looks like they have a declining longtime user base without getting many new ones.@vvv Yes, and that's a year since they closed a $100 million funding round, which they just recently disclosed.
Bluesky announces $100M Series B after CEO transition | TechCrunch
The additional funds have been used to scale Bluesky's team, while the company continues to develop Bluesky's app and the underlying ATProto that powers it.
TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
Doesn't seem like the money did much to help them.
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@aaronmccollum Yes, the chart itself is nothing unusual.
To me, the interesting part is, a year ago they closed a $100 million funding round, which they just recently disclosed. And their numbers have been dropping the whole year.
Can you imagine what we could do with $100 million dollars?
@stefan We could buy a few dump trucks full of pizza.
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@stefan We could buy a few dump trucks full of pizza.
@aaronmccollum We have got to figure out how to get VCs interested in this place. There has to be a way.
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@botvolution Well they'll be pretty restricted, from what I've read, e.g. you'll only be able to add people to them who you follow, they'll be limited in size, you'll be notified when you get added, with an option to remove yourself, and you can opt out from being added altogether.
You'll probably be able to filter out posts that mention or link to them, I'd imagine. (Eg. filter out posts that contain a portion of the URL, if it includes something like "/collection/").
Seems like you can avoid this feature altogether as if it didn't exist at all.
@stefan
I remain deeply unconvinced of either their utility or any supposed safeguards.I can't imagine the usual denizens of dotsocial carefully monitoring their notifs for this sort of activity.
We'll see, I suppose.
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@aaronmccollum We have got to figure out how to get VCs interested in this place. There has to be a way.
@stefan @aaronmccollum Nooooooooo
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@aaronmccollum We have got to figure out how to get VCs interested in this place. There has to be a way.
@stefan With an influx of cash comes a curse. They'll want that money back and more in some form or fashion.
But I will sell out for pizza.
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@stefan
I remain deeply unconvinced of either their utility or any supposed safeguards.I can't imagine the usual denizens of dotsocial carefully monitoring their notifs for this sort of activity.
We'll see, I suppose.
@botvolution Well I think many of the people who'd want to opt out already did, since this is going to be tied to the existing "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms" setting.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/I think it's going to be much of a non-event when they're rolled out, like with quotes. Those have been out for a while, and I don't think they have become a problem?
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@stefan With an influx of cash comes a curse. They'll want that money back and more in some form or fashion.
But I will sell out for pizza.
@aaronmccollum Yeah, plus you can donate some of the food, so it would be all for a good cause.
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@botvolution Well I think many of the people who'd want to opt out already did, since this is going to be tied to the existing "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms" setting.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/I think it's going to be much of a non-event when they're rolled out, like with quotes. Those have been out for a while, and I don't think they have become a problem?
@stefan
I think, in general, I have a more cynical and pessimistic world view! So I incline towards the negative, whereas you are rather the opposite I think!It's hard for me to judge about newer features of Mastodon, because I'm on an instance that is many versions behind (in fact, currently an unsupported version).
My antipathy to starter packs & the whole "public lists" thing is rooted in seeing how it has played out at Bluesky. It is true, tbf, that the userbases are rather different.
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@stefan
I think, in general, I have a more cynical and pessimistic world view! So I incline towards the negative, whereas you are rather the opposite I think!It's hard for me to judge about newer features of Mastodon, because I'm on an instance that is many versions behind (in fact, currently an unsupported version).
My antipathy to starter packs & the whole "public lists" thing is rooted in seeing how it has played out at Bluesky. It is true, tbf, that the userbases are rather different.
@botvolution Ah, I might be missing some context. I have only started occasionally checking out Bluesky recently, to get a better sense of the site and its community, but I'm definitely not very "tapped into it".
But yes, I do tend to be optimistic about features being rolled out. Even the new redesign, Mastodon's team has received some pushback, and they're actually listening.
It's just nice that here the developers and server admins are only accountable to their communities.
We may not agree with all of their decisions, but I guess this is why I tend to trust the people here. I know they don't typically have a hidden agenda, and can be influenced to change their mind.
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Catching up with some of the news coming out of the Atmosphere conference.
"With Attie, anyone will be able to build their own custom feed just by typing in commands in natural language, the same as if they’re chatting with any other AI chatbot."
I'm guessing NFT profile pictures are next?
Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds | TechCrunch
Bluesky’s new app Attie uses AI to help people build custom feeds the open social networking protocol atproto.
TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
#news #technology #TechNews #atmosphere #ATProto #bluesky #AI #LLMs
@stefan AI generated content. The litter of the digital world.
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@stefan AI generated content. The litter of the digital world.
@zenmorph Well in this case it's just going to be used to create custom feeds. But I don't think more AI features are too far behind. We'll see!
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So, Bluesky is getting more crypto VC money, more AI, and a full year of steadily declining activity.
Bluesky User Growth and Active Users
See how activity and usage of Bluesky has been growing over time. How many users are currently active? How many posts are posted daily on Bluesky?
(bluefacts.app)
While the fediverse is getting quotes, UX/UI improvements, starter packs.
Hm!
@stefan Hey, they're totally giving the users what they want, it's just that all those users are the crypto/AI bros on the dev team who spend most of their time gushing about vibe coding and picking fights with anyone who calls them out.
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@stefan the goal of the fediverse doesn't have to be growth, one of the advantages of not being tied to VC funding. I would rather people engaged less here and more in real life, and this place helped with those connections, rather than try to coopt and monetise them.
I want fedi to grow but it's not a separate thing. It's an attention layer for the open web. growth here just increases the value of the commons, making it so the public decides what info, perspectives and art gets attention, not corporate algos. thus why the VCs have no interest in us.
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I want fedi to grow but it's not a separate thing. It's an attention layer for the open web. growth here just increases the value of the commons, making it so the public decides what info, perspectives and art gets attention, not corporate algos. thus why the VCs have no interest in us.
@wjmaggos @BenjaminKlein Agreed. I personally care more about growing the diversity and making fediverse safer for people who are already here.
I'm fine with growth in terms of number of users, I guess, which that might lead to. But don't see it as the goal myself.
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So, Bluesky is getting more crypto VC money, more AI, and a full year of steadily declining activity.
Bluesky User Growth and Active Users
See how activity and usage of Bluesky has been growing over time. How many users are currently active? How many posts are posted daily on Bluesky?
(bluefacts.app)
While the fediverse is getting quotes, UX/UI improvements, starter packs.
Hm!
@stefan I'm never concerned about daily active users. Fediverse is often quality over quantity IMHO
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So, Bluesky is getting more crypto VC money, more AI, and a full year of steadily declining activity.
Bluesky User Growth and Active Users
See how activity and usage of Bluesky has been growing over time. How many users are currently active? How many posts are posted daily on Bluesky?
(bluefacts.app)
While the fediverse is getting quotes, UX/UI improvements, starter packs.
Hm!
@stefan been a few years now since I 'sacked' or 'fired' all the social media outfits and became a fedivers only bod. Best move online wise I ever made.
