Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2411

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Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2411.c

Bluesky now has 20 million accounts, there is a large media attention to Bluesky, people are exploring the firehose, and much more.

The News

Bluesky has continued to grow significantly this week, and it now has more than 20 million accounts, and almost 12 million Monthly Active Users. The growth has gotten significant attention of the media and the public at large, with the large majority of news publications covering Bluesky and Bluesky’s growth. A short random collection of some of the coverage: WP, The Guardian, CNN, The Verge, 404 Media, The Hollywood Reporter, NYT, The New Statesman, NBC, NPR, and at some point I stopped collecting all the links. I won’t rehash what these articles have written about Bluesky’s growth, I’ll focus some additional observations from my side:

The added growth of the platform has posed challenges for the Trust & Safety team, who are handling a significant growth in moderation requirements as well. They are currently handling over 42k reports per day, in contrast with 360k reports for the entirety of 2023.

Threads is clearly feeling the heat of the popularity of Bluesky. In response to Bluesky getting 15 million accounts, Threads boss Adam Mosseri stated that Threads has gotten more than 15 million new accounts in November alone. As Olivier Simard-Casanova points however, this does mean that Threads has not gained any surge in November as a result of people leaving X, as Threads also said that they gained around 1 million users per day in October, same as they now do in November.

Statistics from SimilarWeb also indicate that the gab in activity between Bluesky and Threads may be much smaller than it appears by looking at user totals. SimilarWeb claims that daily visits worldwide to Bluesky and Threads are on a similar level, and that Bluesky might have slightly overtaken Threads in Daily Active Users in the USA. Mosseri denies that SimilarWeb’s data is accurate, but does not provide other statistics. Threads is taking the competition with Bluesky serious however, and has just added custom feeds as well, launching the feature 5 days after Threads started testing it

The increase in usage of Starter Packs had me recently voice concerns on how this impacts the dynamics of the network. Early data suggests that the current migration is actually breaking the trend of the rich-get-richer dynamics. This is somewhat surprising to me, but encouraging nonetheless, and I’m curious to see how research develops.

As an additional note, I’m leaving these two posts that comment on how the media has covered Bluesky, who is happy to describe Bluesky as a ‘nice’ social platform, but is less clear in explaining the role that various minority communities have had in shaping the culture of Bluesky, and where this ‘niceness’ came from.

Some more links

The Links

ATmosphere

NBC spend time on Blacksky, asking: ‘Black Twitter helped define the internet — so where will the exodus from X lead?’. As both Bluesky and Blacksky grow, Blacksky starts to become more own it’s own place in the network. Popularity of Blacksky has skyrocketed, with now over a million views in a single day, and a usage graph that goes straight vertical. The growth of Blacksky also comes with extra moderation requirements, and creator Rudy Fraser is looking for additional moderators. Fraser also gave a Tech Talk this week, talking about the technology behind Blacksky, VOD here.

Teal.fm is a new platform on ATProto that is currently in development, and it is a music tracker. The goal is to provide functionality similar to Last.fm, but with the change that all your listening data is stored on your own PDS.

App Updates

Bluesky’s latest app update brings a redesigned settings screen, as well as a visual indication that posts are imported into Bluesky. ATProto allows people to create posts with an arbitrary date, which people have used to import their Twitter archive and add the date the post was made on Twitter as the same date on ATProto. Bluesky now indicates that this is an archived post, adding the time that the post was actually seen on the Relay as an indication of when the post was actually made on the ATmosphere.

Custom Feeds

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a highly-requested feature for the official Bluesky app, and other apps like Tokimeki and Skeets have implemented them. Other people are building more elaborate work-arounds to bookmark posts as well:

Tools

For Developers

Firehose experimentations

The design of ATProto is such that everyone can access the ‘firehose’. Firehose is the casual term for ‘Relay’, a part of the network that continually broadcasts every event that happens on the entire network in real-time. This gives everyone the possibility to see what happens on the entire network. With the new inflow of people, quite some developers are experimenting with building small apps on the firehose, here is a list:

Misc links

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

#bluesky

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