I think it is important to note at the outset that we no longer live in a time where only one or two social networks will succeed. Gone are the days where “everyone” is using a specific social network for a period of time and then migrating to a new one every few years.
We now live in a time where many smaller social networks exist, some of them will likely exist for decades to come, and most of them may never reach hundreds of millions of monthly active users and that is a very good thing for the web. It is a bit messy, somewhat confusing, and totally great.
Bluesky, like so many other social networks before it, has seen bursts of sign ups for different reasons. Its most recent burst, to the tune of about a million new sign ups per day, may seem impressive. However, the CEO of Threads will be quick to remind you that it has seen that same sustained pace of growth for months even though they are already over 250M accounts.
But these numbers come with so many caveats I cannot even list them all. We know a huge portion of Threads accounts were Instagram accounts. We know there is account overlap. Many (most?) of us have accounts on all of these platforms. Many (most?) of us will post on all of these platforms occasionally. Or, some will use apps or services to cross-post to all of them all the time.
Regardless of the caveats, it is safe to say that Bluesky is growing and a fair number of users that have signed up over the last few weeks may end up staying there longer term.
Though I’m not personally a fan of Bluesky (reasons: hasn’t federated yet, and backed by VC) I want to see it succeed. Having more social networks in the world is, I think, better than having less. But eventually, if all of these separate platforms and protocols connect to one another, we’ll all be talking about a single platform: the web. And that is my ideal.
I hope Bluesky federates soon. It grates on my nerdy nerves that many believe it is a member of the fediverse – but that is just me being an old man. Even Bluesky members knowingly joke about the fact it isn’t yet federated. I know, the client app is open source. I know, it is an open source protocol. But Bluesky (the service) has yet to federate. It takes a bunch of third party bits to decentralize the data, and a bunch of other third party bits, to share the data between platforms.
I mentioned my wishes for Bluesky on Bluesky. Since they are seeing so much growth, and have been able to use that growth to raise capital, I hope they use this window of opportunity to make Bluesky interoperate across the open web. Or, at the very least, make the tooling such that “anyone” can spin up an AT Protocol-powered instance called Purplesky or Yellowsky a lot easier than it is today.
The underlying connective tissue, the protocols of RSS, ActivityPub, and AT Protocol just haven’t yet found a way to all seamless play together. But I’m really hoping they will.
This way, each service can succeed and find their own community, their own sustainable business model, and their own set of apps and services that can all communicate with one another. Just like the open social web has always been.
PS. Can we all just look back at 2021 and say that Twitter squandered an opportunity to join the fediverse? What a different world we may be in!
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