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

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/blueskys-active-user-base-is-shrinking-as-its-focus-expands-beyond-the-app/

22•newusertoday•57m ago

Comments

EA-3167•44m ago

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.

toomuchtodo•43m ago

What does success look like? I get what I want from Twitter/X through a pull through cache. I get to read the folks I follow on Bluesky. Works for me? My feed as a utility is working as expected. I keep what I want to read, and mute and block that which I do not. I remain in control of my data and experience of the firehose. If someone I'd like to see on Bluesky is not yet there, I ask them to be. If there is data on Bluesky not yet there but that might have value to others, I pipe it in via a PDS and pub sub automation.

How would email and RSS be the next big thing? Because that is what https://atproto.com/ is, and to some extent, here. A private entity or individual cannot capture the AT Protocol network as happened to Twitter/X, it has already succeeded.

Certainly, this is a different perspective than "What metrics can we use to value this entity we're going to attempt to flip to someone else?" Worst case, the public benefit corp is converted to a non profit and tax deductible donations are used (potentially with a foundational fund built to operate in perpetuity, think Wikipedia) to fund the underlying storage and distribution infrastructure and labor costs for operations, similar to Signal and many other tech non profits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo (nsfw)

(Threads is always there for the normies until it enshittifies and Meta chases whatever catches Mark's eye next)

speak_plainly•23m ago

I think there are two things going on. After launch, there was an exuberant group of users who believed the purpose or aim of Bluesky was to be a recreation of Twitter in terms of user base and impact. They were lead on by the icon a bit and lots of rhetoric. And I think many believed it would destroy X. By their standards, Bluesky is an epic failure.

But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.

toomuchtodo•21m ago

X will survive as long as Musk can fund it from his grift campaigns (he's already lost two thirds of the ad business), it is how pharaoh holds court with his loyal fans. Best to not get too upset about pet projects funded by oligarchs, just get to work on regulating them more during the window of time they continue to exist. Its a politics problem, not a tech problem, as it is most of the time.

SpaceX’s Earnings Show Elon Wiped Out Two-Thirds Of Twitter’s Ad Business - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/10/spacexs-earnings-show-el... - August 10th, 2026

And it appears he's still trying to sue them? Magnificent gambit. Surely this will solve for the egregious losses X has taken.

X wants to keep suing advertisers, asks 5th Circuit to overrule district judge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49213724 - August 2026

> But by the aims of the company itself, moving social media from proprietary platforms to open protocols, it's a major success. And I think it can continue down that path and serve its users.

Strongly agree.

FeloniousHam•27m ago

> it collapsed into being a mediocre bubble like Twitter, but without the scale.

I liked Josh Barro's take: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...

frozenseven•42m ago

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•26m ago

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.

jimmydoe•21m ago

Meta's ActivityPub is very fake, it's not only off by default and functionally limited, but also has a dark pattern to get you turn it off.

It would be the same if they do ATP.

Karrot_Kream•10m ago

Nothing is stopping you from building your own AP algorithm either though, right? An "algorithm" is, ultimately, a ranking model that ranks a set of incoming posts based on some criteria no? Nothing stops someone from building their own ranking model for themselves.

I agree that the Bluesky userbase doesn't really talk about the topics I care about and I think the audience is a big factor.

blakesterz•23m ago

Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...

jimmydoe•19m ago

there's nothing you can do technically to fix bluesky.

people just hate social networks at this point in this timeline.

edoceo•17m ago

Is there a different timeline?

MarkusQ•12m ago

Yeah, but it's behind a cosmic paywall.

nxm•14m ago

Twitter's not doing too bad: 550 and 600 million monthly active users according to platform disclosures and industry estimates

So maybe the trick is to not just cater to left on your platform.

ChicagoDave•9m ago

80% are bots, 10% trolls, and 5% foreign agents.

I’ll take Bluesky over that every day.

actualwitch•7m ago

For reference, pinterest has roughly the same number of monthly active users. [0]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

halyconWays•15m ago

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•12m ago

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.

tptacek•5m ago

The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.

cdrnsf•9m ago

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.

tptacek•8m ago

Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.

TMWNN•2m ago

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.

Euclidean affine functions and their application to calendar algorithms

To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head

Show HN: Get an email when Dario Amodei (or 230 others) gives an interview

Show HN: Cut LLM turns in MCP interactions by 75%+

.com now accounts for less than 48% of YC portfolio company domains

4,099 Qubits: The Myth and Reality of Breaking RSA-2048 with Quantum Computers

Boundaryguard – detect invisible Unicode/Trojan Source attacks in CI

Lightweight, zero-build reactivity library build for MPA's

Procedural Pixel-Art Grass in Rust and WebGPU

DFlash changes what tokens per second means

Nix didn't hang it was evaluating the world

CoreWeave edges past quarterly revenue estimates

The FastLanes Unified Transport Layout

Google's Gemini app surges to one billion users

Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks (2021)

3D Interactive Map of the Silicon Valley

Bumble gives up on women making the first move

uBlock Origin no longer supporting Facebook

My agent hacked my gym

Previous-Token Prediction Based LLM Near-Exact Prompt Reconstruction

Show HN: LidAwake – Keep your Mac awake with the lid closed (200 lines of Swift)

Tiled Rasterization for Large DOM Captures

Introducing Grok Bot

The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Was a Psyop

Show HN: Personal AI Policy Directory

Firefly Aerospace hits record $117.7M Q2 revenue, beating estimates by 34%

Blend2D – High Performance 2D Vector Graphics

Rocky Linux Founder Kurtzer Launches OpenWALDO to Open Up AI Training Data

Glyph – Content intelligence without the baggage

The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment