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.
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).