It's sad that even hitting these meteics will reault in little actual growth. Bluesky is devoid of shareable content. Threads is.... just go to threads and use it and I bet you come away feeling like its unusable like I did. Fediverse when I browse it is like venturing into a ghost town. EVER time I see a blog with a linked acct I check it out. Always they are devoid of interactions. Wordpress blogs have real comments (sometimes) with real interactions happening at a decent clip. Thats the real state of things. Numbers go up predictions like this make no sense to me for one big fat reason, where are the interactions? (I want it to work just ftr)
Hasn't been my experience with Lemmy and some closer knit communities on Mastodon. My interests are niche, though.
IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations.
Point to publically posted bs links or embeds please then. Not F2F shares. That's what I am talking about. X and FB have those in droves and they are a real growth driver.
Slightly tangentially, I expect GitHub to seriously lose lustre as developer de facto social network, with codeberg and self hosted forgejo taking off, leading to a fediverse of instances.
That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.
I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
On that note there's also https://tangled.org built on atproto which (kind of?) solves that. You have one identity (the same one for all atproto apps) which you use to interact with any tangled repository (including those on self-hosted servers).
With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those.
Social movements don't need to be quantifiably better to take off.
When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales.
People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance.
(w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.)
> I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them
The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way.
I really doubt that. People have been hating on GitHub for years or even decades. GitLab at some point very publicly wanted to become "the world's most trusted place for open source software" but I think they gave up, or at least pivoted to AI.
GitHub has one massive advantage which is even people in HR know programmers use it, and they can just glance at a candidate from GitHub. For as long as this remains in place, GitHub will survive.
I would rather use GitLab, honestly. Forgejo, Codeberg, etc, have a CI/CD modelled after GitHub actions which I really don't like, but I digress.
Once there's some universal identity/Single Sign On for these self-hosted platforms, this might become more likely. I need to out nostr logins for Gitea: https://git.mleku.dev/mleku/gitea-nostr-auth
I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals we’re pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). That’s all pretty key for building applications.
Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
- asymmetric social activity
- standing in a crowd social activity
- discovery - curated/accidental/mediated
- directed presentation
- advertising
I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
Something that the social media industry will try hard to stop: users placing an AI agent between themselves and their social media accounts. Smarter clients that front-end a large number of social media services may be the answer to the hassles of federation. If somebody works this right, Facebook/X/Instagram could be Left Behind.
The legacy social media providers face a quandary - prevent all embedding and hide from search, or be front-ended.
When it is their own AI, encourage; anyone else's, prevent.
How do ads work when ever fewer real people are looking at them? Targetting specifically people who don't use AI is one option — I hear there's big bucks in literal fraud ads, and the big players (or at least Musk) do seem somewhat opposed to basic regulatory requirements such as "tell us who paid for these ads".
> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features.
That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.
As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Nobody really uses it like they did twitter. it doesn't have the same vibe. it just feels forced. the science community might save it as a kind of summarizing service.
i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere.
i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky.
bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."
Mastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive.
Some of the worst of the pile-on, scolding, pearl clutching behaviors that made everyone very glad to see certain people leave other platforms make large swathes of bsky totally worthless. It's like a mashup of the worst parts of reddit and twitter.
There are a couple nooks and crannies that are worthwhile, but at scale it's not a good place. The vibe is "something went wrong" and "poor decisions have led me here" and not "warm, welcoming, vibrant, innovative community of wonderful people."
> As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out.
Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.
What’s unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I don’t have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates.
On twitter it highly depends on who you're following. If you specifically wanted to avoid political posts, it's not that hard to steer your algorithm that way. I follow ~130 people, and outside of maybe 4 of them who I like hearing political comments from, I only get interesting tech/tech-adjacent discussions. Almost zero politics.
In the past, whenever I get some politics stuff or celebrity news in the main feed, I just press "not interested" and relatively quickly those types of posts stop showing up.
On the other hand, I'm not sure who actually uses bluesky. Can't say I've ever felt the desire to go on there.
I use Bluesky to keep up with software development news. The ability to default to my "following" feed is a big plus. I mostly see software related stuff and the stream of posts is slow enough that I reduced my time spent on the app.
Launching in early 2026, Eurosky Social [0] is coming.
> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.
> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.
Thanks for the link. Seems like they want to be a European identity (and maybe more) provider for the AT protocol.
> We’re launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026]
I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true.
Yes, it's weird to be predicting the future when you can't predict the past. It's been negative over the entire year; the only growth it ever had was between Trump's election and inauguration: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.
If you are putting something out for free for anyone to see and link and copy, why is LLM training on it a problem? How’s that different from someone archiving it in their RSS reader or it being archived by any number of archive sites?
If you don’t want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication.
Fear of AI scrape? I'm just amused at the idea of my words ending up manipulating chatbots to rewrite stuff that I've written, force-feeding it in some distorted form to people silly enough to listen.
The article is OK albeit unaware of what is happening on the NOSTR world so I'll take the liberty of making some predictions related to NOSTR:
1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution
2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example
3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques
The sheer breadth of Nostr's current development is overwhelming at times. I often find myself exclaiming, "What? Nostr can be used like that?"
At present, Nostr appears to be merely a protocol operating within a social media framework. Its capabilities are vast, yet it fundamentally only requires "sending JSON via WebSocket and signing it using the specified algorithm."
From what I see, WebRTC is the key to achieve direct P2P connections.
I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies.
Readit News
IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations.
That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.
I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those.
When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales.
People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance.
(w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.)
The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way.
Just bookmark the repo.
GitHub has one massive advantage which is even people in HR know programmers use it, and they can just glance at a candidate from GitHub. For as long as this remains in place, GitHub will survive.
I would rather use GitLab, honestly. Forgejo, Codeberg, etc, have a CI/CD modelled after GitHub actions which I really don't like, but I digress.
Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
- asymmetric social activity - standing in a crowd social activity - discovery - curated/accidental/mediated - directed presentation - advertising
I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
The legacy social media providers face a quandary - prevent all embedding and hide from search, or be front-ended.
I think you've misspelled "will actively encourage"
How do ads work when ever fewer real people are looking at them? Targetting specifically people who don't use AI is one option — I hear there's big bucks in literal fraud ads, and the big players (or at least Musk) do seem somewhat opposed to basic regulatory requirements such as "tell us who paid for these ads".
That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.
i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere.
i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky.
bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."
There are a couple nooks and crannies that are worthwhile, but at scale it's not a good place. The vibe is "something went wrong" and "poor decisions have led me here" and not "warm, welcoming, vibrant, innovative community of wonderful people."
- Sports
- Law
- Authors
- Comedy
- Video Games
- Programming news
- Other general news
Really feels like you are projecting a bit.
Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.
In the past, whenever I get some politics stuff or celebrity news in the main feed, I just press "not interested" and relatively quickly those types of posts stop showing up.
On the other hand, I'm not sure who actually uses bluesky. Can't say I've ever felt the desire to go on there.
> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.
> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.
[0] https://www.eurosky.social
> We’re launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026]
I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true.
In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.
If you don’t want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication.
At this point, I'm writing for myself and not for any particular audience, b/c even if I'm discovered, I'd be discovered by AI.
1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution
2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example
3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques
I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies.