Is Bluesky dying? - by James Ball - Techtris

The author posted something that led to some controversy... "The subject that had proved so contentious? Bluesky’s user numbers." So here he provides "an attempt to get some more concrete numbers to look at", as well as some nuance. Some key points:

• "In the first few days of April 2026, average daily posters had fallen to the level of September 2024 – handing back everything the site had gained since Trump’s election win" - using "likers" was more generous.
• "Grok nudifying scandal ... caused another spike ,,, much smaller ... and within just three months, it had handed back all of those gains."
• "Threads had an estimated 141 million daily active users in January 2026, while X has 125 million... There is still a huge pool of people using text-based social media daily, and Bluesky is appealing to less than 1% of them... [despite] Threads is mostly full of AI slop and out-of-date memes, and X is quite often a far-right hellhole."

The better question is: why care? It's just one app, and why should it be global if all we want is somewhere that's not "full of fascists, trolls, and bots"?

Answer: monetisation. While "investors will be happy to subsidise the losses of a company if it is growing... at some point... investors will stop paying for it." Meanwhile, it competes with the immensely deep-pocketed Meta and Musk.

And moreover, Bluesky culture

• not exactly welcoming to new normie users who "don’t use Linux on desktop... want a plug-in-and-play social experience. Bluesky isn’t that.
• "gleefully chase off power users who dip their toes in"

"The outright hostility to growing the tent a bit is probably one of Bluesky’s obstacles to growth... Certain Bluesky subcultures enjoy brigading as a bloodsport, and regard high follower accounts as the most fun prey."

He then opens an interesting parenthesis about journalists moving to Bluesky: "It does seem odd to many that journalists get upset by being brigaded on Bluesky when so much worse happens daily on X... most journalists care a lot more about what people to their left think of them than people on their right." Defining himself as left wing, he admits that "I can’t just easily dismiss even the most bad faith shitgibbonery when it comes from the left." He suspects the same of many journalists, which means "the online hard left [has] ... cultural power over people they often despise – even if they then tend to squander it."