Ultimately the goal "build a nice community where people can enjoy social interactions" is fully incompatible with "build the next Everything For Everyone Social Website like twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/etc so that we can get 5 billion users and start pushing ads at people". Unfortunately once you take VC funding, you no longer have the option of doing the former.

From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine, but there's no investor who would take a look at the site's user statistics[0] and say "oh yeah things are going great." There needs to be drastic changes if investors hope to have any return on investment.

[0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

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pron 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Another problem is that Twitter's demise left people who liked the format disenchanted and suspicious (and rightly so), and because of that, trying to recreate Twitter is bound to fail, at least until some more time passes.

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ghaff 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.

	▲	throw-the-towel 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And it should well stay dead. Short form social media is just too good a fit for outrage farming.
	▲	alex1138 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Jack seemed interested in the protocol side of the house and making a good product that was in spirit of the internet, it also had a mix of people you might know IRL (with reasonable privacy defaults) and official sources/public figures. I don't think he was much interested in the censorship, it feels they got run over by a bunch of activist types during covid (who decided it was de rigeur to censor real doctors for perceived 'misinformation'). Jack started work on Bluesky and now is involved in Nostr Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"

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jauntywundrkind 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of Twitter's strengths was that it was a constructive community where near services & informational/radiative bots chilled. It was a connective fabric, it made information available.

That's all been gone. The algorithm fav'ing paid blue check users massively made things worse from there.

Bluesky attempts to be better on all fronts here. Interesting apps/services are welcome, permissionless. There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.

Sure there's some who will just be burned out & not interested. But there's so many interesting structural safeguards & such a openness to play & creativity & tuning... I really encourage folks to give it a time. I would definitely hope that "bound to fail" is perhaps not a cast die, that, we tried something great once, it's gone, never again, is not how this works.

	▲	cindyllm 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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ValentineC 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Twitter's main problem wasn't the network, but fElon Musk running amok.

	▲	pron 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course, but the damage was done.

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verdverm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That user number is not reproducible last time I tried (~8 months ago). I was looking at the code the other day and saw what I believe is one of the reasons, but I still couldn't find several million accounts (>10%), which is pretty hard to lose. (8+ bsky run pds equivalents)

This also does not account for (1) people with multiple accounts (labellers, feeds, bots, intent) or actual activity (significant % are likely churned, didn't delete)

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mjr00 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Even if the stats are off by a factor of 10 it wouldn't matter. You could remove the numbers from the user axis entirely and it would paint the same story: there were massive user influxes after the 2024 US election and the inauguration in January, but user retention has been on a steep decline for the year+ since.

Again, this is not a reflection of anything bad about Bluesky as a user. IMO a smaller and more focused is a good thing for the actual community, hence why I read/post on HN and not Reddit or Twitter. However as an investor there's basically no way to interpret those statistics as anything but bad.

	▲	verdverm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Strong agreement, though I would say it looks to have reached a stable level for now. I've found several subcommunities that I can get good info from. I'm curious how the '26 election cycle will affect things, already seeing increase political discourse.