Bluesky app users will increase by 300% by November 2024, reaching 3.5 million daily active users.



According to a survey by a research company, the social networking service Bluesky gained a large number of users during the US presidential election in November 2024. It is believed that this was largely due to the influence of Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), who openly supports Donald Trump.

Meta loses ground to Bluesky as users abandon Elon Musk's X

https://www.ft.com/content/e1b52147-c171-4902-8bce-204ba0905912

How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

How decentralized is Bluesky really?
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/22/how-decentralized-is-bluesky-really/

Bluesky's UI and atmosphere are similar to 'the old Twitter,' and it is often mentioned as the top candidate for an alternative service to X. In the past, there have been several cases where users have switched to Bluesky when major changes were made to X, such as when X was banned in Brazil or when X announced changes to its block specifications . Since November 2024, there has been a phenomenon in which the number of users has temporarily increased at a rate of 1 million per day .

On November 20th, the number of users surpassed 20 million, and as of the 25th, official statistics showed that it was over 22 million.

According to Bluesky CEO Jay Graeber, the US, Japan and Brazil are the three most influential countries, with these three making up the top three user base.

10. The three largest countries on Bluesky are the United States, Japan, and Brazil, and these countries were early adopters since our invite-only days as well. Thank you for being here! 💙

— Jay 🦋 ( @jay.bsky.team ) November 20, 2024 3:24



In Japan, following the clarification on November 15th of a provision in X's terms of use that 'posts may be used for AI training,' some creators and their followers who were averse to AI training were seen leaving X.

Unlike X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky has stated that it will not use posts to train AI - GIGAZINE



According to data from research firm Similarweb, the number of Bluesky app users in the US and UK jumped by around 300% on Election Day, reaching 3.5 million daily users.

The Financial Times, a business newspaper, analyzed the increase in the number of users in the United States and the United Kingdom as being due to 'academics, journalists, and left-wing politicians no longer using X.' The background to this is that the influence of Republican Donald Trump and his supporter Musk may be growing stronger within X.

Trump has long criticized social media for allegedly censoring conservative opinions, and has appointed Brendan Carr, who has advocated for stronger regulations on big tech such as Meta, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in an attempt to crack down on censorship from the perspective of 'protecting freedom of speech.' On the other hand, X plans to keep censorship to a minimum, as Musk has previously said that he wants to make it 'like a town square where everyone can voice their opinions.' In addition, X has completed the 'Community Notes' concept, which existed as a concept even before Musk's acquisition, and has built a system in which a certain type of moderation is done by users rather than the management side.

What is the algorithm that decides whether to display or hide community notes on X (formerly Twitter)?



While X constantly displays a variety of topics as 'recommended,' including politics and science, Meta intentionally reduces the number of political recommendations.

Meta's Facebook, Instagram and Threads will no longer actively recommend political content related to laws, elections or social topics. This change was made in February 2024, and expands Threads' original goal of creating a public space for people interested in less angry conversations to Facebook and Instagram.

In addition, Threads has focused on displaying recommendations since the beginning, but in November it added a feature that allows users to choose the topics they want to see, reshaping the environment so that users can choose what they want to see. The Financial Times points out that this move 'has led to speculation that Meta is trying to curb the rise of Bluesky (which allows users to choose what they want to see).'

Bluesky looks similar to X, but unlike X, it uses a decentralized SNS protocol, which means that even if the operating company goes bankrupt, users can move to another SNS while maintaining their posts and relationships, and all users can see the same data regardless of which server they access from.

Another feature is that it uses Bluesky's own 'AT Protocol' instead of the decentralized SNS protocol 'ActivityPub' used by other Fediverse services .



According to ActivityPub architect Christine Lemar Weber, Bluesky uses what she calls a 'shared heap' architecture and offers features such as comprehensive search capabilities and the ability for Node users to see entire conversations, even if the messages come from accounts they don't follow.

On the other hand, ActivityPub's 'message passing' architecture, where each node imports only messages from accounts that the node's users follow, rather than the entire network, has the advantage of reducing the overhead of storing messages across the entire network.

Bluesky's 'shared heap' architecture allows users to retain their content even if they move to a different host. However, since user information is sent through a Bluesky node once, it is more centralized than ActivityPub, and there are concerns that DMs are not end-to-end encrypted.

The developers of Bluesky have expressed their desire to standardize the AT Protocol.

I asked the people at Bluesky about everything I want to know right now, such as 'Bluesky's ambitions,' 'Bluesky's monetization plan,' 'Bluesky's official server specifications,' 'Will the API ever become unusable?' and 'The relationship between Jack Dorsey and Bluesky' - GIGAZINE



in Web Service, Posted by log1p_kr