Posted by kevinak 6 hours ago
I'm asking this not bc I like enshitification, but the app view design seems such a perfect fit for user data mining/targeting, that it's hard to believe it was not part of design consideration in day one.
The day Bluesky decides to enshittify there’s a very real possibility that they might also just stop allowing people to extract their keys and splinter off the network. The enshitification begins when VCs turn upp the heat it they start getting low on cash.
No idea why people have such a hard time joining and supporting the Fediverse.
“The signing key is entrusted to the PDS so that it can manage the user's data, but rotation keys can be controlled by the user, e.g. as a paper key. This makes it possible for the user to update their account to a new PDS without the original host's help.”
What I see here doesn't look good.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
Never mind the pivot to reddit.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit...
Source: Bluesky COO https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/growth-and-su... (somewhere towards the end in the Q&A section).
One way they failed hard is that they talked about how they were against the investors and VC incentives, then they took $100M from Bain Capital (PE) just after peak user count, but didn't tell us for almost a year. They could have put up a simple $5/month to support the cause, but they took investor money instead. This is why I left.
Bluesky has ~50M registered users and has sustained ~5M monthly active users for long while. There's no reason to believe it will fall substantially below this level.
It is also in the process of adding (decentralized) subcommunities, which I expect to be really cool and have a large impact on growth.
Registered users is not at all meaningless. Bluesky has those user's email addresses, the mobile app is still installed on many of their devices, they have accounts, and they can potentially be reactivated.
For example, if Bluesky announced a feature exciting enough, like subcommunities, it could email those 50M users and possibly bootstrap a serious open network competitor to Reddit.
https://bsky.app/profile/tyggero.cz/post/3moskpisnuc2t
Source: https://sifa.id/stats
Statement from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3mmp27wwnic2j
The stats page you linked to explains exactly what's going on. These spam PLC identities have nothing to do with with the tens of millions of real Bluesky registered users.
Either you misunderstood or you're being intentionally dishonest.
At current rate it will 50M in 6 months.
eg. I personally had more than a dozen accounts
Most users signed up by downloading the app or visiting the web site and created a single account.
As a point of reference, the official Google Play store independently verifies that the Bluesky app has had 10M+ installs.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blueskyweb...
There are no official stats on the iOS app or web but those are both likely similar or larger sources of users.
The reality is that a significant chunk (>50%) was Blue MAGA, or turned off by them, and I see little prospect that they will reactivate. Outside of the Bluesky echo chamber, there is a deep brand association with Bluesky being primarily political refugees. They see Bluesky as the left-wing Truth Social. I've asked hundreds of people IRL if they have heard of Bluesky, they are far more likely to have this brand association than to have heard of "atproto" (more than half vs 1-2% / can count on one hand).
Right now, Bluesky has one large community, which is already great for some people but not most people. Once Bluesky adds Communities, new communities can form, making it interesting to the other 90% of people who were excited initially and then turned off by it being "one note".
If you'd like to crawl the network to get real data, I built this a while ago https://github.com/verdverm/atmunge (it will take a few days to get sufficient data to do analysis, due to rate-limits)
Certainly Bluesky has stats about mobile app installs / usage. If they were good, they would be sharing that instead of the /users/accounts/ number that feels good but hides the reality. The first step (imo) would be to stop trying to deny reality and start asking why it is the reality. Only then can corrections be made. I don't think the core issues are technical, a missing feature, or a social media modality that was supposed to be built in the atmosphere. (other than my strongly held opinion that public-by-default was the wrong choice and bolting on permissioned spaces now is not a right answer)
How would that even work?
Poor people don't deserve rights on the blockchain anyway, it's not like they can afford the transaction fees, if they didn't want their account stolen they should have tried being rich, or buying into nearer the top of the pyramid.
Don't worry about people who pass away or lose internet for an extended period, we'll deal with that in v2, when we get "proof of death" and "proof of internet disconnectivity" on the blockchain somehow.
/s if it's necessary
I think the key thing to recognise with petname systems is that there doesn't need to be this sort of "top-level consensus" as opposed to ecash systems.
You can have two instances of namecoin, say Namecoin1 or Namecoin2. You can just have different domains like alice.nmc1 and bob.nmc2 and have them interoperate properly. You can just keep forking blockchain-based petname systems to overcome the bandwidth/fee problem.
What this means is that Namecoin1 full nodes don't need to synchronize all the domain names on Namecoin2 and vice-versa. Similar to TLDs on DNS. We can imagine that there might be different petname TLDs for different global regions, and they might be merge-mined.
This isn't true for money applications like bitcoin or eth, because by forking BTC or ETH or something, you are creating new coins.
For example, you could set your petname up so it can be controlled by a single keypair, which can be overridden after a certain time by a ring signature based on keypairs held by friends, family, peers, and trusted computing devices you leave in a safe deposit box.
Or maybe you could trust your identity with some centralized entity, but only as part of a 2-of-3 multisig with yourself and another trusted entity.
Basicially namecoin with bitcoin-like scripting controls.
Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.
You get a reward for being a mining node, not just any node. Even then, do miners have much incentive to share blocks, other than the ones they mine?
I think the incentive is mutual for most nodes (aside from the mining aspect). People will set up a node to accept transactions in an automated manner, or to have higher confidence in the state of their accounts.
It's like being on the floor of the stock market. People participating want to be where all the information is (for their own benefit), and there is incentive to bring others in and share information (because it increases the amount of information you have).
I suppose you could be a "selfish" node. The bitcoin-equivalent of someone who leeches and never seeds. But the advantage is low relative to the amount of money moving around. Most people don't care about the bandwidth of running a bitcoin node, they care about latency. Unlike bittorrent, there isn't a de-facto finished version of the file being synced: it's a constantly-updating list that everyone wants to have the latest version of. I can't find the words, but this seems to be the fundamental difference.