I'm not very active on Mastodon, but saw this post - browsing the bluesky hashtag for a bit afterwards did not really give me much info. I can definitely imagine enshittification happening there, but what is causing the current drama in particular?
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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The other comments are roughly correct in general, but the current drama is because a couple people said "Bluesky is dying" because the number of unique users that liked a post over the past 3 months has gone down (that's the Number that went down), and then a bunch of people got mad at those people because that's a single very specific measure and Bluesky is objectively doing very well and anyway they'd still use it if it wasn't popular etc etc.
Regular internet drama, basically.
It's not just "hey, look,.traffic is down", but rather a few.folks saying "see, traffic is down because you keep commenting negatively to politicians and journalists "
The stats are trending down, but not precipitously so and still at a level that (AFAIK) eclipses the whole fediverse. And there are plenty of journalists and politicians who engage or endure the negative feedback.
Fair enough. I only got what people were originally complaining about from context; I woke up too late to see those complaints, just a billion replies.
If it’s “objectively” doing well, I assume you can support that with some data?
Based on the chart that they are referencing, while the monthly uniques is lower than the spike, it's still higher than the previous plateau.
Spikes are moments in time and less important than a sustained use which still shows growth.
That could just as easily be an increase in bot accounts. Not super convincing.
The lull after the spike could just as likely show a drop off in bot accounts active during the US election. But that's immaterial because growth is not the same as success.
As long as it's got an active returning user base that gets value from the product and is able to curate their own experience, it's able to sustain itself based on the money it has/gains, people are building new tools to make it more engaging, and it's not being taken over by undesirable actors so that active user base starts to look at another solution, and sites increasingly see Bluesky as a driver of traffic to their websites, it think that would qualify it as a objective success.
If you have a different metric, please feel free to share it.
I feel like you're coming at this pretty aggressively. I don't feel like getting into a fight, but I'll reply once:
I don't like Bluesky. I find its culture very US centric, depressing, and frustrating. However, I also find it is technically better than any activitypub software I've used, and protocol-wise, much better specified.
It also has >30 million users, and is much more prominent culturally.
Lemmy and the microblogging activitypub software are more pleasant to use, but definitely rougher around the edges.
Feeling like I’m being aggressive for asking you to show what you’re basing the claim on, and then deflecting to technical strengths of the platform, really isn’t painting a picture of objectivity.