Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.
Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform’s entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.
The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website “Bluesky Stats.” Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.
It’s impossible to know whether Musk’s comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.
The same reason people aren’t going for Lemmy.
Aside from the fact that the Fediverse is an incredibly confusing concept to the average user, those same users are entrenched and connected to everyone they already want to be connected to on the same platform. Until they are essentially forced to move, they’ll stay on Twitter. The people on Lemmy and Mastodon right now are a tiny but vocal minority compared to the massive userbases of the platforms they abandoned.
Yeah there really needs to be a rethink of how the Fediverse works.
I don’t want to have to subscribe to 8 different “Games” subs each with under 3000 users.
It really should be like “topics” more than “sublemmys” (or whatever) where every post on the Fediverse tagged “games” will appear on your feed when you subscribe to the topic.
The topics still get moderated by the local instance topic moderators and instances can defederate from troubled instances, but discoverability would improve exponentially.
Maybe how it could work is sublemmies could agree to link up and share posts so for example the posts from one games sub would appear in the other games sub and vice versa.
It seems the limitation with the topics idea is who would decide what the topics are? Would there just be a list of like 20 topics baked into Lemmy and people that create sublemmies would tag their sub with a topic? I think the only limitation with that is there would be so many niche subs that don’t fit cleanly into one topic, or will be drowned out by the big subs in there maybe. Maybe it could work though if anybody could create new topics, then there could be a Fallout for example with the Fallout subs being in that rather than having to be in the games topic and being drowned out
Yeah it sorta needs to be back to hashtags to tag content so that it can all be in a community despite being in different instances and subs. It’s really disjointed and currently the fediverse feels like we went back to AOL chat rooms where it’s a lot of people waiting in their own room for someone to come in and talk to them.
It doesn’t work and it doesn’t really inspire conversation anymore.
Yeah it is like that unfortunately. I mean the larger subs are fine but the niche ones just aren’t working on Lemmy atm and some way of addressing the sub splintering would help a lot. And yeah hashtags would probably be a solid way of addressing it.
How did the average user ever figure out email?